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My harvest 



BY 

RICHARD WHITEING 

AUTHOR OF "the ISLAND," "NO. 5 JOHN STREET" 
ETC. 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD b- COMPANY 

MCMXV 









Printed in Great Britain 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER I 



PAOB 

Atte Bowe 1 



CHAPTER II 
Schools and Schoolmasters ..... 17 

CHAPTER III 

College ......... 30 

CHAPTER IV 
Little Grub Street .45 

CHAPTER V 
Fleet Street 59 

CHAPTER VI 
Paris Again 76 

CHAPTER VII 
Interviewing ........ 93 

CHAPTER VIII 
Spain in Revolution 108 

V 



vi CONTENTS 



CHAPTER IX 



PAQK 



Provinces and Metropole ..... 123 

CHAPTER X 

Republicant France . . . . . ,135 

CHAPTER XI 

King Victor Hugo . . . . . . ,147 

CHAPTER XII 
A Russian Realist . . . . . .158 

CHAPTER XIII 
Prussianized History ...... 171 

CHAPTER XIV 

The Real Asian Mystery ..... 18S 

CHAPTER XV 
America in Fact and Fancy ..... 206 

CHAPTER XVI 
France Herself Again ...... 221 

CHAPTER XVII 
People and Things ..,,.. 238 



CONTENTS vii 

CHAPTER XVIII 

PAGE 

Victorian London ....... 254 

CHAPTER XIX 
Literature and Journalism ..... 268 

CHAPTER XX 
Clubs 288 

CHAPTER XXI 
Salons 297 

CHAPTER XXII 
Faiths and Unfaiths ...... 304 

CHAPTER XXIII 
Threshing Out 817 



CHAPTER I 

ATTE BOWE 

LIFE has been called a scene of adventure 
tempered by a little philosophy on the way. 
It is not exactly my view, but the majority incline 
to it as the only one that reconciles the rule of 
thumb to self-respect. Hence, I suppose, the 
fascination of pure romance in The Arabian 
Nights, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, or even at a dis- 
tance from these, the egregious Roderick Random 
with the due subservience of its hopes of im- 
mortality. The earlier romances are mostly of 
this cast ; and I should be glad to get the benefit 
of it, if only I could plead their license of invention. 
Happily the adventure being sometimes in the 
nature of spiritual experience, does not always in- 
volve shipwreck and the shooting of lions. But 
it is invariably events and incidents first, and the 
moral, if anywhere, only at the end of the 
journey. The old masters at any rate usually 
began with a birth as the greatest of all accidents, 
and never stopped till they had got their hero 
married at least, and not seldom comfortably 
entombed. 

I was born, alas ! as far back as 1840 ; and there 
is still so much to see. My father held a modest 
place in the Inland Revenue Office at Somerset 



2 MY HARVEST 

House. He was of a stock of Yorkshire farmers 
whose tombstones standing to this day mider the 
shadow of Beverley minster — usually bore the 
word " yeoman " to show that they were tillers of 
their own land. They had everything proper to 
their rustic state including a family Bible dated 
1639, and still extant. My sire seems to have been 
the first of the line to make the great venture of 
London — walking all the way and carrying his 
own rations to keep the little hoard in his pocket 
intact. My mother — well, if I had the genius of 
Barrie, she should have a book all to herself. 
When I lost her fostering care, the lonely man 
was lucky enough to find rooms suited to his 
means in what was then the classic land of the 
London lodging - house, Norfolk Street, Strand. 
The fine old street has been rebuilt : it is all 
stately offices now ; it was then a double line of 
Georgian fagades, where you had to lodge, if you 
wanted to do so in a certain style. Hotels were 
few, and most of them dear and comfortless with 
unpleasant suggestions of the public-house. Mr. 
Spectator, it will be remembered, had rooms in 
Norfolk Street as far back as the reign of Queen 
Anne. Peter the Great once stayed there ; and 
since then the place had had time to rise from its 
Hanoverian ashes and still to mellow into the 
beauty of age in which I knew it as a boy. It 
sloped towards the river, without meeting the 
embrace ; and the only way of getting out of it 
was to retrace your steps to their starting point in 
the Strand. From a lofty terrace, its railings rusty 
with years, you looked down on Thames, sweet or 



ATTE BOWE 3 

otherwise as the case might be, and needing no 
poetical apostrophe to induce it to take its course 
softly to the sea. There was usually something to 
look at — a Lord Mayor's procession, a boat race, 
rowed in topper hats, an old-fashioned man of 
business on his way to the City in a boat pulled by 
a nice ruffianly sort of waterman — on gala days 
perhaps in coat and badge. And where these 
failed, there was always, moored right in the line 
of the street, the very ship in which Captain Cook 
circumnavigated the globe, picking up continents 
on his way. It was now a floating lock-up for the 
rascaldom of the river — we are matchless among 
the nations for pleasantries of this sort. No in- 
scription proclaimed its great achievements in 
every clime, no flourish of trumpets, nor even a 
bo'sun's whistle sounded a Whitmanian salut to 
the seas of the world from its timbers steeped in 
their brine. For most of us who gazed it was a 
question, not of what feet of Argonautic heroes had 
once trod its deck, but only of what variety of 
river scum had taken their places. 

Within, as without, the old street was all beauty 
of domestic architecture, with a suggestion of 
retirement and of perfect peace. There were four 
stories to the houses, counting the garrets, cavern- 
ous subterranean kitchens importing a bridge over 
the well in which they lay, and beneath these, 
regions of impenetrable darkness where the coal 
was stored, and where an adventurous infant some- 
times went to look for ghosts or listen for rats for 
the fearful joy of successful flight. The back 
garden of my own particular house of dream had 



4 MY HARVEST 

disappeared save for one big surviving tree that 
threw a welcome shade over the whole place in 
summer time. In the winter it dripped what I 
must still call cosy desolation over a clean paved 
yard, to urge you indoors for the comfort of a 
hobbed fire-place and a footstool. This yard, with 
an old summer-house to keep it in countenance, 
was all that was left of the floral associations of the 
past ; but its type, in pictorial presentation for- 
ever, is to be found in some of the Dutch works at 
the National Gallery. The style came to us with 
William of Orange, and it was but a copy of a copy 
in the Georgian time. The rich West Indian or 
American planter went to Norfolk Street for all he 
wanted in substantial comfort as it was under- 
stood in that day — a spacious reception room over- 
looking the street, wherein also he dined at four 
o'clock. It was the fashionable hour, as it gave 
him time to sit over his wine before starting for 
the theatres, nearly all in a bunch within a stone's 
throw, or for the wilder dissipation of the Cider 
Cellars, with Evans's supper-room to follow for 
the wind up. The wealthier people brought a 
servant or two with them. But there were all 
sorts, from these swells of the drawing-room to the 
single gentleman class, like my father, who had but 
a bedroom to his name, and who took his meals, by 
arrangement, with the landlord and housekeeper 
in their private room. The perfect suite for the 
nabobs included a bedroom leading out of a sitting- 
room, and beyond, a dressing-room that might 
hold a bed at a pinch. What more could you 
have, or at any rate what more did you get in 



ATTE BOWE 5 

that age ? It was the height of dignity and dash. 
They took your orders in the morning for the meals 
of the day, bought the provisions in accordance, 
cooked them, stored the remains to your credit 
as the dishes were removed. It imported much 
cold mutton for customers of a thrifty class, but 
the remedy was at hand in the shape of a whole 
shopful of pickles and sauces in the neighbouring 
Strand. 

It was really a fine thing to be born at such a 
time, because it marked the opening of that 
Victorian period which marks a most significant 
parting of the ways of English social life. It was 
all so delightfully new as we saw it. The cry 
was " our young Queen and our Old Constitution," 
as succeeding the shibboleths of the immediately 
antecedent William and the Georges, most of 
whom never had a youth of hope. We were all 
going to turn over a new leaf and be good under 
the benignant influence of a virgin monarch to 
whom any sort of moral imperfection was simply 
a thing unknown. 

But I couldn't live at a loose end, in even the 
best of lodging-houses. There was my education 
to think of. I was rising eight, I fancy, ere I 
attacked but the second of the three R's. I could 
not shape a pot-hook, and had never handled a 
pen except to break it. It was to be school, and 
boarding school at that ; the lonely man could 
think of nothing better. Behold me then, not 
without tears from the housekeeper and the maids, 
on the way, under parental convoy, to Bromley -by- 
Bow, then just out of range of the London smoke. 



6 MY HARVEST 

I had given no tears in return, being full of pleasur- 
able delight in a new school box, mine, and its new 
outfit. All had contributed something — the old 
lodging-house keeper a new hat, a topper in real 
beaver, as they wore them in that day. How the 
father had come to his choice of an academy for 
young gentlemen I know not, perhaps by adver- 
tisement, but he had been wisely led. Bromley- 
by-Bow was dotted all over with fine old buildings, 
and one of them was a palace ancient of days. 
Mary Stuart's son, James the First of England, 
and the Scottish Sixth had come south to unite 
the warring crowns, and being fond of hunting he 
had begun in a kingly way by making a sylvan 
solitude for himself with its starting point at 
Bromley, and calling it a chase. Bromley was 
then a lovely village, and it remained so to the time 
of my first acquaintance with it. The old palace, 
the private school to which I was taken, was 
the loveliest thing in it, not of course in conscious 
realization to me, but simply in beauty of illusive 
suggestion — all I wanted at that age, perhaps all 
one wants at any. Imagine then the old gabled 
building all wainscot down to its meanest rooms, 
and in its great hall a glory of rich carving, 
arabesqued ceiling, and fire-places as elaborate 
to scale as a cathedral porch. It stood in its own 
grounds, and nothing ugly was there, or mean, 
within sight or sound of it. The playground was 
a clearing in the forest with still many of the 
oldest trees in their place. The light that never 
was on sea or shore was to be identified at last 
between them and the skies in a chiaroscuro of 



ATTE BOWE 7 

sunshine seen through the leafage of spring. The 
schoolmaster's walled garden was of the peace 
that passeth understanding, with a mulberry tree 
in the garden that was our tree of life too when 
it yielded pie as an extra on days of festival. 
Beyond our bounds it was all loveliness still — on 
the one side an orchard where an old-fashioned 
farmer raised fruit for the London market, on 
others the plough land where he raised corn. He 
was no doubt unfortunate in his neighbours of 
the orchard boundary, but what he lost in that 
respect was our gain. For, according to all the 
rules, a boy's education ought to include the 
pilfering of apples as a preparation for the adven- 
turous work of life. From them the hero proceeds 
to islands, and to empires later on. The practice 
has grown into disuse in our day, but the girl 
queen was as keen for it as any of her predecessors. 
An orchard to rob, and no questions asked, would 
be a positive recommendation for a seat of learning 
in our spiritless time. Nothing ugly, I said, or 
mean anywhere within reach of us. For, again 
beyond bounds, it was but the old Seven Stars 
Inn gabled and wainscotted like the rest, or a tuck- 
shop with bull's-eyed window-panes that played 
fantastic tricks in optics with the items of the 
stock. 

And then for the dignity of age in the associa- 
tions, if we had either known or cared, think of 
the neighbouring church to which we were marched 
for the Sunday services. The very hunting lodge 
was nothing to it in that respect. For here we were 
on the site of Chaucer's convent-church " scole of 



8 MY HARVEST 

Stratford atte Bowe," not to be confounded with 
the other Bow church, but a bowshot from it, in 
the main road — a first offence in punning that shall 
also be the last. Still less to be confounded with 
the one in Cheapside. Everybody goes to these, 
guide-book in hand, few carry the pilgrimage as 
far as my old church — mine and Chaucer's, in 
regard to the identity of the sites. I am right 
glad of it. I give it away in writing indeed — for 
how resist the temptation ? and yet inconsistently 
I want its memories all to myself. The convent 
was venerable for its antiquity even when Chaucer 
knew it as part of a Benedictine nunnery founded 
by the Conqueror. The present church now calls 
itself St. Leonard's, after the name of its parish; 
but St. Mary's it was, and should be, for all time. 
Fragments of the old building were walled into the 
new one when it was rebuilt in 1842 — perhaps as 
we now lace concrete with steel to make it last 
to the crack of doom — among them a slab of Pur- 
beck that marks the resting-place of a knight and 
his wife buried there in 1336. Witness, too, another 
really exhilarating tombstone of a later date. 

As nurses striue 

theire Babes in bed to lay 

When they too ly-berally 

the wantons play 

So to preuente 

his farther growinge crimes, 

Nature his nurse 

gott him to bed betimes. 

For nigh eight hundred years end on end they 
have closed evening service on that spot with 
" Lighten our darkness," either in the English 



ATTE BOWE 9 

liturgy or in the Roman original. With its cadences, 
said or sung, and worthy alike of the end of a day 
or the end of a life, it was, I think, about the first 
bit of " established " religion that got fairly into 
my soul. 

I don't mean to say we were fully sense-con- 
scious of all this delicate perfume of time in church 
and school, but still something of it was there. 
More might have been found in the former case, 
if they had not contrived to associate the morning 
services with a fine of pudding for the offence of 
going to sleep during sermon — and, worse luck, 
Sunday was the only pudding day. A wretched 
usher surveyed all the file for this lapse, which I 
daresay he was only prevented from repeating by 
having to make a note of the names. These were 
called over after the joint, and their owners had 
to rise and march out. The bigger boys pretended 
that it had its compensations, as, once outside, 
you might swear without risk of detection. All, 
I think, would have preferred the chance of the 
pudding. 

Our " Head " was the mildest mannered Church 
of England parson that ever ruled an urchin mob. 
His name was Stammers, and he bought the school 
of the widow of a Mr. Safe, who, to this day, has 
his tombstone near the door of the church. He is in 
good company of celebrities dead, gone and forgotten 
— worshipful citizens whose worship ended with 
their lives, a sprinkling of Huguenot exiles, and no 
doubt many a golden lad and girl long since gone 
to dust, with the local chimney-sweeper. Some of 
the tombs have been shifted, but on the whole the 



10 MY HARVEST 

old place is pretty much as it was in my time. 
Mr. Safe was a stern disciplinarian. Mr. Stammers 
was of quite different stuff. He, and his maiden 
sister to match, were all beaming benevolence and 
goodness of heart. I doubt if ever he laid violent 
hands on any fellow-creature in his life. On taking 
charge, he publicly proclaimed from his desk that 
he had the strongest objection to flogging, not, as 
he assured us, on humanitarian grounds, but only 
because he was naturally of a nature so ferocious 
that he shrank from the very thought of the con- 
sequences to the offenders. It was understood 
that his blows would be death or maiming for life, 
and he implored us for our sakes, and his own, 
never to put him to the proof. We had only to be 
reasonable in misdoing to be sure of every con- 
sideration for our persons, and meanwhile he 
would be content to chasten by impositions. We 
were much impressed, myself in particular, yet it 
fell out that I was the first to put myself beyond 
the means of grace. I had wantonly launched a 
speculative stone, in the nature of a bolt from the 
blue, through the window at which he and his 
sister sat at tea. He harangued us on the incident 
to the effect that he had to draw the line at utter 
depravity, and he gloomily ordered me to follow 
him to his room. I did so with the feeling that 
I was making premature acquaintance with the 
end of all things, and my sobs rent the air. Yet 
these were nothing to my roar as the cane fell on 
my shoulders from a dizzy height that threatened 
annihilation. I am bound to say I was agreeably 
disappointed in the result. It was what I after- 



ATTE BOWE 11 

wards learned to recognize as a stage blow, and 
it fell with almost the softness of a caress. It 
was the same with the few that followed, though 
I roared on by way of payment in advance for 
what was sm'c to come. In fact nothing hap- 
pened, not even a cloud of dust from my jacket. 
The dear old chap ! 

But we were soon to be stirred by fiercer excite- 
ments, almost imperial in their scope. Suddenly 
London began to loom large on the sight of our 
sylvan retreat. It was the year of the Chartist 
rising of the '48. What a year ! It thrilled all 
Europe with terror and wrath. It gave the im- 
pulse that peopled America : the great emigration 
set in with — " To the West, to the West, to the 
Land of the Free," sung under the silent stars 
specially benignant in their watch over the boats 
that carried the hungry horde. And what a day 
of all its days when the Chartists called their 
meeting at Kennington Common. Kennington 
was then to London proper what Brooklyn was 
to New York, a sort of glorified village " on the 
other side of the water " where old-fashioned 
people led leisurely lives. The London mob was 
to march there for a great demonstration in further- 
ance of the demand for a charter of popular rights. 
Anything might happen on their return, primed 
with oratory, desperate with the sense of wrong, 
wild with the sense of opportunity in a luxurious 
capital lying at their mercy. That was all we 
knew about it in forecast, and most of our betters, 
the grown-ups who formed public opinion, were 
in the same plight of invincible ignorance. It 



12 MY HARVEST 

was a lurid programme. "Mein Gott, vat a city 
for to pillage," said old Blucher, when he drove 
through the London streets after the peace of 
1814. 

So on the great day we had our special messenger 
to the capital to examine and report. The dear 
old Head, self-chosen, was naturally the man. He 
set off in the morning as to an heroic adventure, 
and with us, of course, sleep was out of the question 
till his return. We discussed his mission in the 
dormitories, squatting on the beds in our night 
gear, not unlike Indians round the camp fire. 
Our room, and every other I daresay, had its 
tactician and its politician, as leaders of the pow- 
wow. The politician was severe on the rabble — 
boys are mostly born snobs — and he made the 
running for the tactician who undertook to show 
how they were to be massacred to a man. The 
Duke of Wellington, " conqueror of Napoleon," 
was in command of the troops, and our military 
adviser, being apparently deep in his counsels, 
assured us that he knew his plan. The insurgents 
were to be prevented from getting to Kennington 
at all costs, and to find themselves penned in their 
tracks by horse, foot, and artillery, and reduced 
to mincemeat. Mincemeat it had to be : nothing 
less would content us. In imagination we listened 
like the dwellers in sacked cities seen in dreams, 
breathless, cowering behind closed doors for the 
first shrieks of death. Yet we would not have 
foregone those shrieks for all the world. We 
wanted our thrill. Imagine our disgust then when 
we had to learn from the home-coming parson that 



ATTE BOWE 13 

there had been nothing of the sort. The Duke 
seemed to have entirely missed his opportunity. 
He allowed the enemy a free crossing to the side 
of the river where there was no mischief to be 
done, but when they came back at night, angry, 
hungry, footsore, they found the bridges barred 
and the sullen cannon between them and the 
palaces, public offices, banks, and what was still 
more of a hardship for the poor creatures, their 
miserable homes. They were filtered over in 
detachments at last, and kept on the run till they 
reached their hovels dead beat, and the day of 
doom ended in their utter discomfiture without 
the firing of a shot. The dear old Head called it 
a greater victory than Waterloo, and suggested 
prayers for the merciful victor. He had them all 
to himself. 

It was impossible to quiet down after such 
excitements. There was a fight in our dormitory 
next morning, what about I forget. The principals 
were a leading politician and your humble servant, 
both in nightgowns — such was our ardour for the 
fray. I won — by a fluke, and I make no boast 
of it. In one of those wrestles for the fall, then 
fashionable in contests of this sort, my oppo- 
nent's head struck the floor. The hoUowness of 
the sound seemed to preclude all possible danger 
of concussion, but he gave in. I don't know why, 
but something prompted me to kiss him. My 
second frowned. 

" Stash it, little 'un ; that sort of thing isn't 
done here." 

The victim himself seemed to submit to it only 



14 MY HARVEST 

as he might have submitted to a poultice. It was 
my first anti-climax and I took it to heart. 

In due course I heard from my father how the 
day had passed with him. As a Government 
officer, he was, so to speak, pressed for the service 
of the special constabulary. It was a Falstaffian 
army, though in broadcloth instead of rag-tag and 
bobtail, and everybody who had a character or a 
position to lose was expected to join. The Govern- 
ment issued truncheons and a badge for the arm ; 
old soldiers improvised a rough drill. Somerset 
House was guarded by these old employees, mostly 
the cankers of a long peace, men who had never 
struck a blow in anger since they left the play- 
ground. They were useful no doubt as a moral 
example, but they would probably have been a 
terror to their own side if it had come to the touch. 
Cowardice had nothing to do with it ; it was 
simply the lack of the habit of strife. Their office 
was now their guard-room, and they roystered 
there in true military style. A generous adminis- 
tration supplied provender and moderate pota- 
tions, and here and there a blade who felt he had 
missed his vocation rollicked in a song, " A soldier's 
a man ; a life's but a span ; why, then, let a 
soldier drink." As a variant, yet still on a military 
motive, another gave " The Banks of Allan Water." 
Though an officer of the department, this one had 
been excused from attendance because he was a dwarf , 
but he had insisted on remaining, with the result that 
my father never forgot this song. He said that it 
was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, and 
he bought it in broad sheet, as they sold songs 



ATTE BOWE 15 

at that time, for his delectation in old age. He 
had many projects for the period of his retirement 
from the service : one was to learn to smoke. 

I think he shed tears over the song, though he 
would never own to that. He had the English 
horror of the display of emotion. In the gravest 
event of his life, I saw him giving way, not at the 
eyes, but only at the chin. The latter was crumpled 
up in corrugated folds, and seemed to shrink for 
shelter within his ample stock, saving his face in 
the upper part, and hiding its loss in the rest. But 
he was tender in his own way on visiting days. 
Perhaps, as to demonstrations, he was a little 
checked by the majesty of the surroundings. 
Such meetings took place in the state room of the 
old palace, parent and child sitting by a fireless fire- 
place, cavernous, vast, as measured by the propor- 
tions of a small boy. They talked only as freely 
as they dared, with a surmounting Royal Arms — 
as one might say life-size over the mantel to keep 
them on their good behaviour. Once, when he 
thought nobody was looking, he took me on his 
knee. But he soon set me down again — perhaps 
as having caught the eye of the unicorn. 

I sometimes go to look at the fire-place now, not 
in situ in its palace, but at South Kensington 
Museum, where fragments of it were providentially 
intercepted on their way to the house-breaker's 
yard. Years and years after I first knew it, the old 
place had to die the death to make way for a 
highly developed slum, with rows of mean houses 
effacing the glorious playground and the orchards, 
and in their midst a barrack-like School Board 



16 MY HARVEST 

building to make weak amends. The details of 
desecration were shocking, but the County Council 
was able to save something at the eleventh hour, 
and to preserve the memory of the rest in a mono- 
graph on " The Parish of Bromley-by-Bow," with 
which I have but one fault to find, that it is not 
printed in letters of gold. 

As I stand by the old fire-place in the public 
museum, I seem to be once more in that dim 
Victorian abysm of time. Then in a leap I am 
back in fancy to a still earlier day, with Mary 
Stuart's son — and perhaps Steenie and Baby 
Charles to keep him company — slobbering his 
hunting jokes at the feast that followed the death 
of the stag and the curee in the courtyard, with 
all the Georgian ages and their festivals between. 
To think of that, and then of M. Bergson's placid 
assurance that there are no yesterdays and no to- 
morrows, but only one river of Now in everlasting 
torrent — pa-ta-tra ! 



CHAPTER II 

SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 

BUT presently I was taken from the old school. 
Somebody, perhaps a nebulous aunt in far- 
away Yorkshire, had given my father a good 
talking to on the subject of my need of " mother- 
ing." Truth to tell I was a bit too young to be 
without a woman's care, for the change came 
shortly after the '48. Behold me then transferred 
to St. John's Wood, to the house of an old sailor, 
retired on his laurels as an ex-Navy man, and on 
his savings as a jerry-builder after his discharge. 
His wife was warranted capable of the mothering, 
though the couple had no children of their own. 
I was a sort of plaything for them, and they made 
much of me, insisting on my calling them ' father ' 
and ' mother,' and generally getting all the benefit 
of having young life in the house. They were 
nearing their sixties. The old man was one of 
few words, but I think he liked to have me near 
him, pulling his things about, and generally giving 
him the excuse for administering what he called 
the rope's end, in the shape of a cuff. He was a 
product of the old press-gang system. The gang 
had swept down on him one fine day when he 
was leaving his work as a bricklayer, and carried 
him aboard a man-of-war to go and fight the 
c 17 



18 MY HARVEST 

Americans in the war of 1812. It was astonishing 
how Httle he had to say about that contest, or 
anything else in hfe. He was one of the taciturn 
sort, and was, moreover, afflicted with asthma, 
which is a great promoter of that frame of mind. 
I have sometimes wondered whether he knew what 
the war was about. He made no boast of his 
share in it, he said nothing depreciatory of the 
enemy : he just grunted " takin' o' Washington 
in America, 1814," and left it there. On the rare 
occasions on which he took a drop too much — 
once a quarter or so, when he broke out for a day — 
he was more expansive. But it was not in the 
Pindaric vein. He loved ditties of sentiment 
— " On the Banks of the Shannon when Sheila was 
nigh," such is my perhaps poor recollection of the 
opening line. His wife, who could be tuneful 
without the aid of stimulants, sang " Arms and 
the Man," to the theme of General Wolfe and his 
glorious death at the taking of Quebec. She was 
aware of it as a real live issue, having learned it, 
and little else, of her mother who lived to a great 
age. Between them I got my first notions of the 
epic theme of history. Meantime, as I gradually 
improved in my reading, I picked up anything 
that came in my way, among the rest notably 
Uncle Tom's Cabin when it reached us in England 
— I think in 1852. So, after a fashion, I became 
aware of some of the most decisive events in 
American story, ranging from Montcalm to Mrs. 
Stowe as the precursor of the great Civil War. 

I have often thought how little in this way would 
serve to carry us back to the remoter past. If we 



SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 19 

imagine a succession of ancestors of ninety giving 
their recollections to infants of eight, who passed 
them on, with the accretions of experience, at the 
same advanced age, we should soon have a human 
chain of very few links to the latest events of our 
own time. I am too lazy to work it out, but ten, or at 
most eleven, of these oral chroniclers should bring 
us right back to Senlac and Norman William, with 
his all-compelling mace that gave the Saxon 
peasant a sort of hereditary headache in presence 
of his superiors, from which he suffers to this 
very day. The written chroniclers, with their 
huge superfluity of detail, give an impression of 
distance which is wholly illusory : a garrulous 
grandfather or two would soon carry us back to 
the Mayflower. 

St. John's Wood at that time was a village under 
the lee of London, very much like the Bromley-by- 
Bow which I had left. It had and has the dis- 
tinction of being our first garden city of the modern 
variety made on a scheme of town-planning to a 
definite end. Its rise synchronized with the period 
at which the prosperous London tradesman ceased 
to live over the shop of which his family, at least, 
had grown ashamed. The new settlement had of 
course to be within an easy drive of town. His 
chariot, or the stage coach, took him to business 
in the morning, and brought him back at night to 
his villa and his wife and daughters — the latter 
a distinct part of his state as including the harp 
among their accomplishments. On Sundays, some- 
what later on, he went to worship at St. John's 
Wood Chapel, and listened to an evangelical 



20 MY HARVEST 

preacher in a Geneva gown. His gardens perhaps 
sloped down to the new canal — the " Regent's 
Canal " to this day, to help fix the date. Or if 
he was for more style, it was at hand in the range 
of mansions which Nash and others were building 
all round the brand new Regent's Park. For all 
we now say against it, there has been no bolder 
attempt to make London a second Rome of Augus- 
tus if only in stucco. They had a great sense of 
vista, and they gave us our great palatial terraces, 
York, Chester, Cornwall, and what not, wherein 
the detail of individual ownership is lost in the 
imposing mass of the general plan. The effect for 
the beholder, especially for the foreigner, was that 
Caesar or his modern equivalent, had one terrace 
all to himself and Msecenas another. In St. John's 
Wood there was more of the personal touch, but 
the general character was the same. One villa, 
nestling among the surviving trees of the forest 
out of which the whole district was hewn, was the 
Horace of the translators, in the smug retirement 
of stage rocks, running rills, and willows weeping 
their genial sorrows into glassy pools. The great 
peace that followed the downfall of Napoleon is 
commemorated to this hour in the names of some 
of the thoroughfares. Douro Cottages was Welling- 
ton in his chrysalis state, Wellington Road marks 
the height of his glory : meek little Woronzow 
Road stands for the great Russian diplomatist, 
and so on. The fiery Lord Dundonald, one of the 
illustrious mercenaries that helped to found South 
America, under his family name of Cochrane, still 
has a street all to himself. 



SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 21 

Into this classic village there came one day to 
settle a schoolmaster, a French refugee. But few 
of us knew him for that at the time : it was a 
later discovery. In name, if not in appearance, he 
was as good an Englishman as the best of us. He 
passed as a Mr. Howard. His English had nothing 
particular the matter with it to our uncritical 
ears : it was only his looks that failed him a little 
in the character. 

He was a pure-blooded meridional, I should say 
— a Roman nose, jet black hair, a long sallow face, 
a blazing eye — the raw material of the ideologist, 
in every place and clime. After knowledge showed 
him as a wild man of the French revolution that 
started on its second grand tour of Europe in 1848. 
He went through it all, as one of the Reds, whom 
Cavaignac had to mow down by thousands to save 
the Republic from itself, and keep the vessel of 
state with its head to the wind. Of course he was 
on the beaten side — that is to say, with the ex- 
tremists. They made a good fight for it — Paris 
in a state of siege for four months ; horse, foot, 
and artillery in the streets, especially artillery ; 
the Faubourg du Temple pounded into submission, 
and the end in a regular capitulation as between 
army and army. Naturally such a man was one 
of the first to get killed or exiled under the coup 
d'etat in '51. Louis Napoleon, Prince President, 
had no use for the long-haired, especially when they 
happened to be of the class of college professors, as 
was this one. 

He came to our shores, I daresay, without 
waiting to pack his trunk, but with a most extra- 



22 MY HARVEST 

ordinary outfit of hopes and dreams. He had the 
best culture in the gift of France, could read the 
stiffest classics like a newspaper, and as a man of 
letters was everything that he was not as a Re- 
publican. On the barricades, I am sure, there was 
no getting him to listen to reason ; in his class 
room no getting him to listen to anything else — a 
man in two distinct pieces never quite joined. 
Before the open page, especially when it was in 
Greek or Latin, he was all for tradition, restraint, 
measure, and the horror of the needless word. He 
was not without means in his flight. He took a 
villa, put forms and desks in its small breakfast- 
room, and opened a school which he never thought 
of calling classical, because it never entered his 
mind that it could be anything else. Pupils 
dropped in, myself among them, because the old 
sailor thought I was not getting on properly with 
my writing ; and, as they came, whatever their 
ages, sizes, or opportunities in life, they were 
immediately put into the classic tongues. 

What a school ! what a master ! In a few months 
we were nibbling even Greek with him, and he 
was giving us a sort of foretaste of the great 
tragedies. How he did it I don't quite know, but 
there it was. The lessons were delightful. It was 
a revel of the mighty line, with war and adventure, 
heroes, gods, and goddesses, and life abounding 
for its theme. We took to it as ducks to water, 
never suspecting that it might be a poor prepara- 
tion for our destined lot of the small clerkship, or 
the place behind the counter. The sailor waived 
the point of the penmanship, when he saw the 



SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASxErtS 23 

crabbed characters in my exercise book, or at any 
rate was disposed to take them as a new variety 
of ornamental writing by which he set great store. 
The master " jawed " us into fine thoughts, wise 
or foohsh as the case might be. Every lesson 
was a long talk about everything, including the 
shortcomings of things British — the glory of things 
French in art and arms. We learned to be ashamed 
of Waterloo as a battle won by a fluke. He would 
tell us with trembling lip of the day when France 
was beset with " twice one million men," not 
forgetting to mention the advantage of putting it 
that way for rhetorical effect. 

Then suddenly it all came to an end. My father 
was shown one of my Greek exercises, and sniffed, 
still keeping his thoughts to himself. On a second 
visit he was confronted by a proposal of the master 
to put the whole school into uniform next term, 
on the model of the Ecole Polytechnique. With 
that his patience broke down. It was military : 
a thing he hated ; it meant needless outlay ; it 
gave no outlook for the future in accordance with 
his plans. I was taken away and sent to a cheap 
adventurer in useful knowledge who had lately 
come into the neighbourhood. The sociable heathen 
of Olympus, in so far as I had made their acquaint- 
ance, faded out of my ken, and I was never to have 
a second chance. It was a pity. The creature had 
a way with him whatever it was, for I have for- 
gotten its details. All I know is that he made us 
love what is generally the most odious part of a 
schoolboy's task, the learning of the tongues. I 
think our declensions and conjugations came to 



24 MY HARVEST 

us only as they occurred in the text, and in a 
sort of revival of Cowley's method of learning 
not books from grammar, but grammar from 
books. 

I recovered my patriotism, however, by watch- 
ing the Household Brigade, then quartered in the 
adjacent barracks, as they marched out in all the 
glory of pipe-clay and pioneers for the morning 
parade. In a couple of years more came the great 
break in the long peace ; and our Victorian Grena- 
diers were sent out to have their bones bleached 
in the Crimea. 

My father, deeply pondering, had determined 
to give me an artistic calling that should, at the 
same time, be a sort of business yielding practical 
results in a " living." His choice fell on one of the 
oldest in the world, as then practised by Benjamin 
Wyon, who bore the title of " Chief Engraver of 
Her Majesty's Seals," and who was addressed by 
her in his letter of appointment as " Our Trusty 
and Well Beloved." He engraved the great seal of 
England, with the girl queen crowned in her chair 
of state on one side, and on the other sallying 
forth on horseback to execute justice and mercy, 
sceptre in hand. For a thing of this kind it is on 
the colossal scale, a glorified cheese plate in its 
circumference of solid silver, for an impression 
affixed to every grant of a patent or other docu- 
ment specially issued by the Crown. But it is a 
case of the tail wagging the dog : you have to lift 
the seal and leave the parchment to scramble after 
as well as it can. It is in the keeping of the Lord 
Chancellor, and its occasional transference from 



SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 25 

him to a successor is a ceremony of almost religious 
solemnity. It is carried on these occasions by a 
special officer well rewarded for his pains, and in 
an embroidered bag bearing the Royal Arms. 
The theft of the great seal from the house of Lord 
Thurlow in an earlier reign was an event of historic 
importance, and till its recovery all the machinery 
of State seemed to be at a standstill. Why might 
not I, my father mused, in time to come, win 
fortune and even fame as successor to my master. 
His services were constantly in requisition. If 
others made history, he chronicled it in enduring 
bronze as an engraver of medals. His composition 
for the Crimean War — yet to come — was a vic- 
torious Roman soldier crowned by the Angel of 
Peace. He had seen us through smaller troubles 
of this nature, I fancy, in the Indian wars. The 
Shakespeare medal, with all the chief characters 
of the plays as a kind of family party, was also 
his work. Whatever was done in this line was 
usually by a Wyon : they were a kind of engraving 
clan with William Wyon as its chief — Royal 
Academician and Engraver to the Mint. One of 
his masterpieces was the head of the youthful 
Victoria, idealized, and yet a likeness, which 
figured on the earliest of her coins, and gave the 
note even for the postage stamps. His Italian 
predecessor, Pistrucci, engraved the Waterloo 
medal, with the help of his daughter and pupil ; 
the old widower and the old maid working side by 
side to the last, and wholly sufficient to themselves. 
The art is really a branch of the Quietist cult : 
it tends to teach you the nothingness of all passing 



26 MY HARVEST 

perturbations, and the absolute solidarity of present 
and past. The purely realistic medals of Andrieux, 
telling the story of the French Revolution in 
sketchy scenes, are among the few modern excep- 
tions to this rule. It was all in the line of my 
earliest associations : what with the old street, the 
old neighbourhood, the old school, I seem to have 
been born into the past. History, in any sense 
worthy of the name, would be impossible without 
the medallist and the engraver of coins. He fixes 
beyond dispute the epochs of empire and the dates 
of events. Without him we should gaze merely 
in ignorant wonder on that milky way of dead and 
forgotten kings and princes who flourished in the 
prime, when every petty potentate, often not much 
better than a robber chief, struck a coinage for 
himself. The picture and the statue, perishable as 
produced only in a single example, are much more 
at the mercy of time. The coin or the medal in 
its innumerable issues seldom becomes wholly 
extinct. The most ancient arts and sciences have 
their account in it ; it preserves even the quaint 
symboHsm of heraldry in its most enduring form. 
You must know what you are about, to condense 
the whole story of a family through the ages into 
the blazon of a seal. And so must the man who 
tries to make it out. What of this, for instance, 
as a technical description of a coat of arms in my 
old Chaucerian church ? " The centre shield bears 
the'[f olio wing arms — Quarterly, 1st and 4th, arg. 
a chevron gu. between wolves' heads erased sa. 
for Jacob, 2nd and 3rd, az. three trussed lambs arg. 
Crest, a lion statant sa. The shield on the top of 



SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 27 

column on the side nearest to chancel bears the 
charge — Jacob impaling arg., a chevron between 
three stags passant attired or.^^ 

But the old art tends to make prematurely aged 
men. Years and years after this period of my life, 
when I was at Berlin, I bethought me of looking 
up a German brother craftsman by whose side I 
had worked at Wyon's. He had become chief 
engraver to the Prussian mint. Our greetings were 
cordial, as may be supposed, and, in response to 
my cheery " Now let's see some of the work," he 
blinked with modest pride, and turning to a small 
cabinet not much bigger than a grip-bag, drew out 
drawer after drawer filled with specimen impres- 
sions of medal and coin exquisitely wrought. The 
better part of his life had gone into it : I thought 
of Le Sage's " Here lies the soul of the licentiate," 
and somehow wished his collection had bulked 
larger to the view. The art is really a branch of 
sculpture, though its glories escape the eye of all 
but the connoisseur : in spite of the moralists, it 
may still be possible to cultivate well doing on too 
small a scale. 

I was " bound " to Benjamin Wyon in old- 
fashioned indenture of apprenticeship, for seven 
long years. There were not many of us — one or 
two engravers of medals, a single engraver of gems. 
As a highly skilled calling it could hardly have been 
carried on by the methods of the factory. One of 
the seal engravers was a German. There was 
always a German on our staff : we had to import 
him as being better trained for the work than our 
native practitioners. The gem engraver, however, 



28 MY HARVEST 

was of our own people. He worked at a wheel 
which cut the hardest stones in any device, with 
the aid of minute tools of various sizes, some of 
them no bigger than a pin's head, and lightly 
touched with diamond dust and oil. The diamond 
dust perhaps has always been used as the incisor; 
the wheel is quite a modern contrivance but a 
few centuries old. Before that the indefatigable 
Ancients ground out their designs on the adaman- 
tine surfaces of the stone, with a sort of knitting- 
needle of iron or bronze dipped in the solution. 
Working in this way, they produced some of the 
most stupendously beautiful of statuesque com- 
positions in the whole history of art. As these 
were mostly in use as signet rings, they were 
limited in size ; yet so limited, and rarely exceeding 
the square half inch, they want only a magnifying 
glass of microscopic power to reveal groups as 
varied and as perfect in detail as the fragment of 
the Niobe or the Laocoon. One might have been 
a signet ring of Pericles, another a present from 
Alcibiades to a Persian satrap, or a noble or ignoble 
dame. Our gem engraver, perhaps as working in 
this immemorial art, was a particularly quiet man 
who seemed to think that nothing of importance 
had happened for three thousand years. It was 
the very mind of the worker subdued to the 
spiritual suggestions of the medium in which he 
worked. He was a conservative of the deepest 
dye, like most craftsmen of the higher arts. In 
this respect, however, I am bound to say he had 
his opposite in our German of the moment, who 
had come to us as a refugee of the abortive '48 in 



SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 29 

his own land. The honest fellow was extremely 
frank about his own share in the rising, and made 
no scruple of confessing that, when he saw the 
soldiery and heard the guns, he laid his own down, 
and made the best of his way to the ship that 
brought him to our shores. Here he recovered his 
breath and his Revolutionary ardour, and now 
and then stood up for his principles in angry 
controversy, in which, it is needless to say, no 
converts were made on either side. 



CHAPTER III 
COLLEGE 

WHEN work was over, I went on of nights 
to the drawing and modeUing classes of 
the recently established Department of Science 
and Art, then lodged at Marlborough House, and 
founded by the Prince Consort by way of remedy 
for our artistic shortcomings as revealed in the 
Great Exhibition of 1851. The system of teaching 
was a bad one, as it consisted mostly of mere 
copying, but it has since been greatly improved. 
I drew Renascence ornament, from the flat, modelled 
fruit and flowers, heads and hands from other 
models of them, without ever making the acquaint- 
ance of the living originals, and so after a fashion 
learned the rudiments of my calling, for which, 
however, to tell the plain truth about it, I had 
never known the attraction of a call. From first 
to last it gave me the fidgets, and I returned the 
compliment ; I was a very poor hand. We were 
left too much to ourselves to pick it up or leave it 
alone, as we liked. The Germans wondered how 
we learned anything at all. " I worked under my 
father's eye," one of them used to say, " with a 
' mind what you're at, young 'un, or you'll get one ' 
— meaning a clout on the head." 

The art lessons outside soon grew stiffer, and 

30 



COLLEGE 31 

made more im'oads on my time. In due course I 
had to leave Marlborough House and the School 
of Science and Art for Leigh's in Newman Street — 
one of the two great schools (Gary's hard by being 
the other) which were preparatory to the Royal 
Academy. Thackeray's Clive Newcome worked 
at one or the other of them, I fancy the latter. 
There it was all high art, with no thought of an 
application to any kind of manufacture, and with 
what was supposed to be the rigour of the game. 
The studio derived its name from the founder, the 
master or, as he ought rather to be called, the pope. 
He was a " character," who had quarrelled with 
the Academicians on their rejection of one of his 
works. He could afford to sulk, and he sulked ; 
the two things generally go hand in hand. He 
had means, and the school yielded an income : 
he said he would never send in another picture, 
and he kept his word. He shut himself up in the 
vast gloomy house, with its cavernous recesses 
running from street to street, and went on painting 
as though for his life. As fast as the pictures were 
done, they were hung on his own walls, until the 
rooms were choked, when the staircase took up 
the wondrous tale. Pictures, pictures all the way 
— Holy Families, operatic brigands of Calabria, 
Roman women at the well, with whole box-loads 
of properties for the use of the models from the 
Hatton Garden slum. It was the old outlook in 
art : the artistic fiat " let there be light " was for 
a later dispensation. Such things had to be 
painted in Newman Street : it was not dark 
enough anywhere else. They were well painted, 



32 MY HARVEST 

after a fashion, with good soHd brushwork, and 
a certain sense of colour, all marred, however, in 
their effect on the beholder by the stifling sense of 
indoors. 

Leigh took himself seriously. He dressed for 
his part after the old masters — black velvet 
dressing-gown and skull cap, to set off white hair 
and flowing beard ; and in all but his excessive 
girth of waist was a fine figure of a man. He was 
not " supposed " to give us any teaching : the 
old housekeeper always reminded us of that when 
she took our fees. All he did in that way was in 
the nature of a bonus. He simply provided casts 
of the great antiques, the Diana, the Milo Venus, 
the Discobolus — the Nike of Samothracc, I think, 
had not yet crossed the seas : at any rate she was 
not there — and so on with most of the other figures 
of the divine pageant, and left you to choose your 
acquaintance for yourself, without the benefit of 
an introduction. You were understood to have 
learned your rudiments before you went there. 
Once a night he emerged for a tour of the galleries 
from a study where he wielded an unresting quill 
for hours at a time. None of us might know his 
subject, but I've an idea that he was engaged on 
a counter-blast to Ruskin, then the heresiarch of 
art, now its fogey. Oh, the spite of the years ! 
*' Pre-Raphaelism," he once said sententiously, 
" means that art was better five minutes before 
Raphael was born than five minutes after he 
died." As a fragment I admit it gives no clue to 
his opinion, yet I fear that with regard to ideas 
he was chargeable with the same fault as the 



COLLEGE 33 

unfortunate travellers of Gadshill, execrated by 
Falstaff as haters of youth. There is much ex- 
cuse for it : new things naturally make enemies. 
Spiritually or otherwise they tend to throw you 
out of your reckoning. " Open air school ! What 
does it mean ? " said another artist of the period. 
" I'll tell you : a skylight to my roof where the 
tiles did very well before. It'll be a long time 
before I see my money back again." The lives of 
the martyrs should take more cognizance of diffi- 
culties of this sort. 

He strode forth, ponderous in tread as the Man- 
Mountain among his pigmies, and with a long clay 
in his mouth. Sometimes it was a tour of gloomy 
silence broken only by sniffs. Now and then again 
a word of praise, or — a thunderbolt. The delicious 
uncertainty of your luck in it supplied the thrill 
that was lacking in his work. It was a long time 
before any notice fell to my share. But one 
night, I was toiling away at a hand of Michelangelo, 
on the great scale, only a few sizes under that of 
Rodin's main de Dieu, when he stopped before my 
easel. It was a hand all ridged with the strenuous 
lines of toil in work or war. I suppose I had run 
to excess of zeal in the attempt to do justice to the 
ridges as they crossed each other in their radiation 
to all points of the compass. At any rate, he saw 
in a moment the weakness of its exaggerated 
strength. " The rails seem all right," he said, 
" but you might give us a glimpse of the train," 
and passed on. Here again there was still that 
want of intelligent direction which is the vice of 
our method. He did not so much guide his flock 



34 MY HARVEST 

as lie in wait to prod them when they wandered 
and strayed. 

Poynter, now President of the Royal Academy, 
and Stacy Marks served under Leigh, with many 
another since known to fame of a kind. One 
notable studio figure must not be forgotten, Henry 
S. Leigh, his son, who wrote " Carols of Cockayne " 
and was shaping well for the laureateship of the 
vers de societe when he died. He appeared only at 
rare intervals in the galleries, and then but as a 
transient and embarrassed phantom with large 
and soulful eyes set in a faraway look that be- 
tokened a total lack of interest in us and our ways. 
I forget if Samuel Butler and Forbes Robertson — 
both only in their first love of a career — were of 
our school or of Cary's. The former was another 
Thackeray in his passion for a rebel art of painting 
that refused to yield to his pursuit, while literature 
was always dogging his footsteps begging for a 
smile. I have heard Robertson say that Butler 
one day timidly put into his hand a copy of the 
first book from his pen — was it The Way of All 
Flesh ? — and that when he took it home both 
his father and mother, no mean judges, went into 
ecstasies of prophecy on the great things in letters 
that afterwards came to pass. 

For good or ill this was the way of studying in 
our Victorian prime. Our methods were antiquated, 
we had a good deal of leeway to fetch up, our signal 
lights emitted but a feeble ray. To that period 
belongs the rise of the Manchester school, not of 
politics nor of painting, though there was one of 
each, but of buyers in the fine arts. In the age 



COLLEGE 35 

of commercial prosperity by leaps and bounds, the 
successful cotton spinner had listened too readily 
to the whisper " have a taste," and he began to 
buy under the inspiration of his brother traders, 
the dealers in art. Many a poor work was foisted 
on him in the belief — honest perhaps on both sides 
— that it would soon be worth double the money. 
Few things were quoted under four figures and 
not a few for five ; but when in after years they 
were brought to the hammer, they reached for the 
first time their true value at something in the 
threes and pretty low down at that. The smart 
of that discovery led to the present craze for old 
masters, which by the way threatens to run the 
same disappointing course. The slump in modern 
art is but a case of the once bit, twice shy of 
Manchester's rueful discovery that the buyer may, 
in his own way, find himself in the category of the 
sold. The moral is one for both sides of the At- 
lantic : don't listen to the prophets of the counter 
and the sale room " onless ye know." 

Meantime, following my own inclination, which 
we generally do in the long run, I read voraciously 
at home, with a strong desire to recover my lost 
chance of a liberal education. I was a pitiful 
ignoramus : so I scraped up enough to join the 
Working Men's College, experimentally for a single 
term. It was then in Great Ormond Street, in 
the very house from which the great seal was 
stolen from Lord Thurlow. At the time of my 
joining, the College was still in its first youth, and 
Frederic Denison Maurice, the Principal, had 
grouped round him, as founders, a number of men 



86 MY HARVEST 

eminent in the church, law, literature or art — 
among them Ruskin, Ludlow, Furnivall and 
Hughes. The idea was to bring the best culture 
of the time down to the workmen, as a check on 
the Revolutionary tendencies of the time. Maurice 
had a keen sense of the brotherhood of man, as 
realized through the brotherhood of the churches 
and the union of classes : his preaching in Lincoln's 
Inn Chapel was a new evangel. 

The moment you entered the College you were 
to feel one with the best in self-respect, with no 
sense of inferiority, except in the luck of oppor- 
tunity, and this the teaching was to set right. 
There was to be no idea on either side of patronage, 
the taint of most of the earlier efforts of the kind. 
In the Mechanics' Institutes, for instance, the 
workman's friend seemed to descend on him from 
the skies, and to be rather in a hurry to get back 
to them, at closing time. There was in some sort 
also the tyranny of the curriculum. I hear 
Maurice now, at one of the College meetings, 
proclaiming " This is Liberty Hall : everybody's 
to do as he likes, and thim that won't do it shall 
be made " — a bull fathered of course upon an 
Irishman. 

Hughes, Chancery barrister in working hours, 
and author of Tom Brown's Schooldays in his 
leisure, stood for muscular Christianity ; and 
among other things took the boxing class, where 
he blacked your eye by way of an introduction to 
the gentle life. The aim was to make the College 
a true university and seat of learning for the 
noblest end of progress in the humanities. The 



COLLEGE 37 

note is preserved in the still flourishing institution 
in Crowndale Road, now one of the largest of the 
kind in the kingdom, and in its way unique. No 
one is invited to go there with a view to bettering 
his lot in the generally accepted sense of the term. 
He may do this or he may not, but his business at 
the College is to better his mind as the organ of his 
soul, and to get access to the best thought of all 
the ages as a means to that end. Our newest 
institutions for working-class teaching, the Poly- 
technics and the like, are not much more than 
technical schools where the student hopes mainly 
to qualify for better wages, and the chance of an 
escape into capitalism. This is no reproach : it is 
simply the statement of a difference ; and those 
who have forced the lower ideal upon the work- 
men have themselves to thank for it. 

Furnivall, the great Shakespearian scholar, and 
greater human being, who died but the other day, 
succeeded beyond all the others in putting himself 
upon a perfect equality with his fellows by the 
process of levelling up. The men under his sway 
were his comrades first and last. He led them in 
long holiday tours abroad, in week-end walks at 
home where it was hard going both in exercise and 
high thought. They were a band of happy school- 
boys, master and men, and he gave them the 
ripest fruits of his amazing knowledge of our 
earlier literature as freely as to the savans of the 
world. His note was plain speaking, simple living, 
and the hatred of all pretence. Compromise was 
foreign to his nature. At the annual supper he 
used invariably, and of malice aforethought, to 



38 MY HARVEST 

scandalize his brother dons by the aggressive 
advocacy of his pet project, the admission of 
women to the classes. The speech usually ran like 
this — I quote purely from memory of course : — 
" Yes, I'm glad to learn from the report that we 
are doing so well ; but why in the name of 
common sense must we still refuse to do better by 
bringing in the girls ? " Shrieks from the students : 
solemn silence at the high table. " What are 
you afraid of ? — that the young fellers may some- 
times take to courting the young women ? Why 
that's the best of all culture, in its right time and 
place." 

What he could not get done by the College, he 
did for himself by starting a sculling club for work- 
girls, that soon became the pride of the river. On 
Saturdays and Sundays he took them out and 
home again, from Hammersmith as a starting- 
point, with Richmond for the tea and turn, and 
club supper for the wind up in quarters. The little 
bearded man with the bright and almost blazing 
eyes was the uncrowned king of the feast. Supper 
over, it was a dance, with the College men in 
partnership. Many of the girls were fine strappers 
to be sure, with no more suspicion of waist beyond 
the girth of Nature than the Venus of Milo herself. 
No harm came of it that I ever heard of, but only 
much good in the shape of abiding friendships, 
and I daresay many a match. This was his practi- 
cal way of doing things. He never moralized on 
the relations of men and women, rich and poor, 
but just brought them all together as chums and 
left the rest to take care of itself. Another scheme 



COLLEGE 39 

of the same sort was his periodical river treat for 
the little girls of the slums — still in the club craft. 
I have sat with him in a boat filled, in utter defiance 
of the load line, with this human freight, myself 
perhaps the only nervous creature in the cargo, 
although I may easily have been the only one able 
to swim. The doctor for one was not. His aquatic 
career was dotted with, spills, but he always came 
out of them right side up, if only astride the keel. 
Yet if anything had happened when we had all 
the children aboard ! I used to ponder, in gloomy 
uncertainty, my choice of the labours of salvage, 
between two infants, each cuddling up to me in 
friendly contest to know which I liked best. Well, 
nothing did happen, so the only thing worth saying 
is blessings on the luck of the event. 

He had his failings, the hot temper and the 
hasty word, that once got him into mild trouble 
with the law in an action for damages for libel or 
something of the sort. He was constitutionally 
immoderate, and was apt to scent a humbug in 
everybody who did not agree with him in every- 
thing. Even the Browning Society of his creation 
was strained almost to breaking point in his 
quarrels with the family of the poet. He classed 
them as snobbish in their estimate of their great 
man. They cared nothing, he used to say, for 
Browning the writer : all their concern was for the 
" gentleman " who by the gift that enabled him 
to hob-nob with dukes, had in Chinese fashion 
ennobled his ancestors. His sister, Miss Browning, 
was certainly not free from this weakness : she 
passed much of her time in covering up the tracks 



40 MY HARVEST 

of a fairly humble origin. Furnivall was merciless 
in his exposure. He took the trouble to trace the 
Browning genealogy, and to publish the results in 
The Academy for April 12, 1902, a few years after 
the poet's death. His researches ended in the 
discovery of a " Robert," footman and butler (who 
died in 1746), as " the first known progenitor," and 
the one that took his fancy most. Robert's son 
was an innkeeper, the two that came next in the 
line were clerks in the Bank of England. The 
poet's grandfather had married a Creole, his mother 
was of German extraction. That nothing might 
be wanting to rebuke " the contemptible vanity of 
successors " he invited subscriptions for a memorial 
brass to a " Faithful Footman," with the sting in 
the tail of the inscription in the shape of a quota- 
tion from Browning, the poet : " All service ranks 
the same with God." These disclosures naturally 
completed the breach between the scandalized 
relations and the man who, as founder of the 
Browning Society, had done so much for the fame 
of their chief. 

Charles Kingsley, though not among the 
founders, had great influence with them, as leader 
of the earlier Christian Socialists, and author of 
Alton Locke. In spite of its shortcomings, that 
book will always have its place in the canon of 
Socialist fiction. If it is no longer a gospel to us, 
it is still of deep import if judged, as every work 
should be, in its relation to the thought and 
feeling of its day. Kingsley was really of the 
caste of the gentry, and never forgot it, or tried to 
forget. He held fast to the idea of social grades, and 



COLLEGE 41 

was as keen for a House of Lords of the right sort 
as for right masters and right men. A landed aris- 
tocracy was in his view " a blessing to the country, 
as representing all that was noble and permanent 
in the national character." The existing society 
was to go on for ever, only high and low were to 
be brought into harmonious relations of sympathy 
and mutual service. It was in fact not much 
more than the Disraelian Young England party, 
with a strong religious bias. The whole scheme of 
the College was of that nature. Maurice was 
Christian first, and certainly no Socialist at any 
time. None the less was he badly mauled at times 
by his brethren of the churches. All have to suffer 
for the good that is in them as well as for the bad : 
if it were not so, where would be the merit of 
virtue ? The Bishop of London forbade him to 
preach in the diocese. Archdeacon Hare called 
him conceited and irreverent. Dr. Jelf expressed 
" horror and indignation." 

Professor Seeley was on the teaching staff, with 
Huxley, Tyndall, Dante Rossetti, Madox Brown 
and Frederic Harrison, to name but a few. One 
and all, teachers and founders, they were of the 
pick and pride of England. 

As to the students, the teaching flowered in 
Marks — we never called him anything else — who 
died but the other day. He began as a printer, 
and stuck to his trade till he was able to retire in 
easy circumstances, the fruit of his own exertions. 
He never had any quarrel with society as such. 
He worked hard at the Humanities for the pure 
love of them ; and while a fair reading scholar in 



42 MY HARVEST 

French and German especially, with some know- 
ledge of Spanish, Italian and Latin for his budget 
of acquirement, he never gave himself airs. He 
thought and spoke as a working man, none the less 
so because his English was as pure as Bunyan's. 
After innumerable benefactions to the College, in 
service and in hard cash, throughout the course of 
his life, he was for crowning this part of his work, 
in his last moments, with a legacy of a thousand 
pounds. But the accident that caused his death 
left him too weak to sign the necessary papers. 
His daughter, however, and her husband, a 
College man, paid the money without expecting a 
word of praise for it or receiving more than a line 
of grateful acknowledgment in an annual report. 
On both sides there was a careful avoidance 
of the assumption that " College people " could 
possibly do anything else. The culture had left its 
mark. 

I did not remain long at the College. I hardly 
know why — I think because I suffered then, as at 
other times in my life, from a most plentiful lack 
of cash. It may also have been because I thought 
I knew a better way : I did not ; but I had to find 
that out. So I bobbed about from one thing to 
another and mastered none. I bought my books 
for myself at the old second-hand bookshops, then 
extant in Holywell Street and in Vinegar Yard 
under the lee of Drury Lane Theatre. " This lot 
4d.," or lower sometimes, down to the penny, with 
here and there a bargain (if one had only known) 
worth buying at fifty pounds to sell again. The 
chances of that sort in literature as in bric-d-brac 



COLLEGE 43 

are no longer what they were. To this day I have 
a Holy Living in all but a first edition, bought for 
a few pence. 

I bought, as I have said, without guidance — 
dead and gone school books, '' Wanostrocht's " Latin 
Grammar — I may have blundered with the name, 
but few, I fancy, will be able to find me out — Clark's 
Latin texts and translations side by side, a century 
or so ahead of the Hamiltonian system, and with 
prefaces to the effect that they were prepared on 
a plan recommended by Milton and Locke. Some- 
times I merely dipped into the Pierian spring, well 
knowing I could never afford to pay for my drink. 
" 'Ow's business, Joe ? " asked a neighbouring 
dealer of a colleague, as I was once engaged in this 
way. " Quiet," was the answer ; " all readers an' 
no buyers to-night." I dropped the volume and 
vanished into the fog to hide my shame. I was 
like the monkey with the nuts in the fable. I could 
withdraw nothing from the vase of scholarship 
because I wanted to grasp all. The College would 
have disciplined me into a restricted choice, and 
carried me through into positive acquirement of 
some sort. I meant well : that is all I can say. I 
sat up till far into the night, kneeling sometimes 
at my task to prevent me from going to sleep in my 
chair. To this period of rather self-conscious 
virtue belongs an alternative plan to enable me 
to rise very early in the morning. I hung a stone 
from the ceiling, and adjusted a lighted candle to 
the cord, contrived to burn so many hours, sever 
the string, and bring down the weight as an alarum. 
This succeeded only too well. The thing came 



44 MY HARVEST 

down with a clatter that roused me and the house- 
hold together. 

Given a certain temperament, and I had it, all 
this portended book-writing or crime — perhaps 
both in a way. I made up my mind to be a writer, 
and to slip the collar of the other art as soon as I 
could. 



CHAPTER IV 

LITTLE GRUB STREET 

THE years passed ; I was out of my appren- 
ticeship and a full-fledged worker in the 
craft I was beginning to abhor. I set up for my- 
self with parental aid, and with varied fortunes, 
mostly bad. But more years had to pass, till 
about my six and twentieth, before my chance 
came. I was anxious not to hurt my father's 
feelings by throwing myself once more on his 
hands, without any present chance of earning a 
living. I had ventured to sound him as to the possi- 
bility of a real education for the Bar, but of course, 
and I think I may say luckily, I found him cold. 
It would have meant more years of dependence 
with scant opportunities at the end of them. If 
I could make the change to another calling with- 
out his aid, or, till it was done, without his know- 
ledge, I might find him more tractable or more 
resigned. But how manage it ? A regular pursuit 
generally implies the fixity of the caste system : 
you tend to that by the force of circumstances. 
I had to think of the way in which his cold and 
reserved nature had risen almost into ecstasy in 
my prospects of a career as they had shaped them- 
selves in his mind. In particular I remember one 
Sunday afternoon's walk in the Green Park when 

45 



46 MY HARVEST 

he had, as it were, glowed with vision as he saw 
me another Chief Engraver, perhaps, to the Mint. 
Buckingham Palace in the background seemed 
to glow with him under the evening sun, be- 
nignantly as though with the promise of another 
" trusty and well beloved " on the part of its 
august inmate, and all for me. 

The long-desired opening came unsought at last, 
as such things usually do. There was a scheme 
afoot for a Working Class Exhibition, as between 
England and France, and through the good offices of 
a friend at Wyon's, another rolling stone like my- 
self, I was offered the post of secretary at two 
pounds a week. I was to go over to Paris, en- 
trancing prospect ! and invite the French work- 
men to co-operate with their English brethren 
in showing what they could achieve on their own 
account without the assistance of the capitalist. 

Behold me then in Paris with hardly a word of 
French to my name, a matter one had almost 
forgotten on both sides. I could read it without 
much difficulty, for I had not ignored the subject 
in my scheme of self-education, but the rest was 
still to seek. Luckily it was not exactly so bad 
as that with German. I had exchanged lessons 
with one of my foreign mates in the workshop, and 
could rattle away in pigeon German wholly innocent 
of grammar, almost as easily as in my own tongue. 
And by good hap this served. The secretary of 
the French committee spoke German quite well, 
and expounded me to his colleagues in a way that 
served. 

What a new world Paris was, in all the well- 



LITTLE GRUB STREET 47 

known stages of the first experience of foreign 
travel. I had never before left England, hardly- 
left London and its neighbourhood. Of course, 
the first impression it gave me was that foreigners 
were deliberately " contrary " in their marked 
tendency to differ from our way of doing things. 
Everybody knew that brewers' drays should be 
broad, but not long. Here they were narrow 
and so long that they could hardly turn a corner. 
This was carried out in everything one saw — 
manners, institutions, social life ; and since Eng- 
land was manifestly just so, it seemed a pity to 
make wilful departures from it. I was a raw 
hand. 

This state of mind was shared by " my Com- 
mittee." In our exquisite ignorance of the state 
of parties in France we could think of nothing 
better than to ask for Imperial patronage. It was 
given only too readily, at the instance of M. Emile 
Ollivier, then in office and in high favour at Court, 
as a deserter from the Opposition led by Jules 
Favre and M. Thiers. This was bad enough as a 
beginning on our part, but when we went straight 
from him, in all innocence, to the real leaders of 
the workmen who detested both the minister and 
his master, we perpetrated a very pig upon bacon 
of blunder and confusion. The workmen could not 
refuse to co-operate with their French enemies, 
since the invitation came from their English 
friends, yet how could they play second fiddle to 
the Imperial Government. They did it all the 
same, for our sakes. Perhaps the deplorable 
French of our circular of invitation melted their 



48 MY HARVEST 

hearts. The whole thing must have been a pecu- 
harly sore trial for the most influential men of the 
popular party, the two Reclus, Elisee the great 
geographer and Elie his brother and colleague in 
science. 

It was a great thing to be of their intimacy, 
though I was not in a position to enjoy the full 
advantage of it. They lived in the Batignolles, 
a sort of Parisian Camden Town. Such freedom 
from all pretence is not at all uncommon with men 
of the first importance in France. At a later 
period I used as a journalist to call on Jules Simon, 
ex-President of the Council, in his fifth floor suite 
in the Place de la Madeleine. I have dined with 
Yves Guyot, an ex-minister, in a modest third 
floor over the water and in a patriarchal setting of 
family and friends. Degas the painter used to live 
like a simple bourgeois. Elisee Reclus was then 
laying the foundations of his monumental work 
The Earth, with many a year to wait for pecuniary 
results. He was emphatically a man who lived 
by and for ideas. He had married a lady of colour, 
quadroon perhaps or octoroon, wisely indifferent 
to the fact that such unions were not common 
among the white races. She was of great refine- 
ment both in manners and in her cast of mind. 
I had to sit dumb in their salon partly through 
timidity, mainly by reason of my want of their 
language — and in a manner deaf, for the same 
reason. But I could use my eyes ; and there, as I 
afterwards came to know, I was in touch with the 
little band who were quietly engineering the fall 
of the second Empire, and the revenge of the 



LITTLE GRUB STREET 49 

democracy for the cowp d^etat. It was a great 
experience — a revolution in the making, quiet 
walks and talks between bloused workmen and 
professors, the frequent woman in the case, and 
all animated by a common purpose and pursuing 
it with a relentless single-mindedness common to 
the French character. There was even a certain 
pedantry in their devotion. For them Napoleon 
III was no emperor : he was Monsieur Bonaparte, 
and the Empress was but Madame his wife. They 
never paused or slackened till they had sent both 
packing, after Sedan. That done, the Reclus, 
under the same dominion of their fixed idea — the 
people as rulers and masters of themselves with- 
out appeal — engineered the Commune against the 
Republic of the bourgeoisie. We know what 
happened after that — Elisee caught, and saved 
only by the appeal of the whole world of science, 
when he stood almost under the rifles of the firing 
party. 

The elder, Elie, was the perfect thing in fanati- 
cism, cold and self-contained. He might have sat 
for the portrait of a Covenanter. Spiritually he 
reminded me of those animals whose jaws lock 
in what they bite. Heredity may have had some- 
thing to do with it : the father was a Swiss pastor 
of the Calvinistic type. The pair, I imagine, had 
long since parted with their Christianity to put 
philosophic Anarchy in its place. With old Blanqui, 
another notable figure of the time, they were for 
ni Dieu, ni maitre^ the absolute freedom of the 
individual to walk by his own light, with nothing 
but his conscience for guide and law. Hence their 



50 MY HARVEST 

share in the rising of the Commune. It was no move- 
ment for license for its own sake. On the contrary, 
it was rooted in the old idea that you had but to give 
man perfect liberty, to make him the nearest approach 
to an angel we are ever likely to see. Their aim 
was the irreducible minimum of authority, and 
they hoped to find it in the commune as the atomic 
unit of administration. The smaller the unit, the 
nearer to perfection : Paris was a big commune, 
but that was an accident of the situation. For 
the ideal, imagine a village with, say, a hundred 
inhabitants. The hundred were to be omnipotent 
within their own bounds, and with a sort of 
secretarial agent carrying on their will, but this 
only by way of friendly suggestion. For the will, 
even of a majority of ninety-nine, was not binding 
on the hundredth man : he might stand out, for 
his convictions or for his whim. It was good 
going in metaphysics, yet hundreds of thousands 
spilled their souls for it when the time came. 
There are some six and thirty thousand communes 
in France : had all gone well in Paris, there would 
have been as many independent states. If a single 
one objected to railways, it might say " thus far 
shalt thou go and no farther " to the longest line. 
This was the pure absolute of doctrine, as meekness, 
self-sacrifice, and turning the other cheek was the 
absolute of Christianity ; but there were com- 
promises for the weakness of human nature — an 
imperious necessity under which, as we know, a 
certain servant of the high priest had to lose an 
ear. Elisee, with all his natural kindness of heart, 
could not avoid the compromise of revolution. 



LITTLE GRUB STREET 51 

" Never has great progress, special or general, been 
made by simple specific evolution : it has always 
been made by a revolution." He signed a declara- 
tion to that effect with Kropotkine and many 
more. He did so probably as a geographer : Zola 
may have been thinking of him when he put this in 
the mouth of one of his characters : "I was forced 
to make a place for the volcano, the abrupt cata- 
clysm, the sudden eruption, which has marked 
each geologic phase, each historic period." Yet, 
if there had been cursing in Elisee, he could 
have cursed the bomb and the bomb-throwers : 
" Anarchy is the summum of humane theories : 
whoso calls himself an Anarchist should be gentle 
and good." 

I came most in contact with Elie because his 
English was better. The only soft spot in him 
was his love of literature : he usually carried a 
volume of Hugo in his pocket, perhaps as the best 
expression of the current revolt for freedom, in 
that domain. Yet, inconsistently enough, he was 
disposed, as a Frenchman, to make a reservation 
here in favour of order and law. Our easy-going 
independence of these things in English letters 
was hateful to him. " The negroid dialects," he 
once remarked to me in his icy way, " have the 
same simplicity of structure." He looked on 
Carlyle as a sort of jelly fish of authorship — amor- 
phous, as he was wont to put it, by way of hoisting 
the engineer with his own petard. He was a poor 
companion, concentrated, silent, cold, but there 
were gleams as of banked fire in his eyes that 
boded mischief, and no doubt accounted for a 



52 MY HARVEST 

deformity of one hand, resulting, I believe, from a 
sabre stroke during the cowp d'etat. I told him I 
should like to be a writer : " It is quite enough," 
he said, "to be a man." I drew a fancy portrait 
of him in John Street as Azrael. He was the most 
implacable person of principle I have ever met, 
machine made, to ends and uses of machinery, in 
every fibre of his being. 

We held our Anglo-French Working Class Ex- 
hibition, at Sydenham, in due course, and I had 
to return to England with my new occupation gone. 
To go back to the old one was impossible : I had 
lifted the curtain on a corner of life. For good 
or ill, I was going to try my luck in writing for 
the Press. 

I had ten pounds : I determined to make it last 
as long as I could, and meantime, to write, write, 
write. So I took a lodging in a sort of Little Grub 
Street — in all but the name — running out of the 
Gray's Inn Road, and with a garret floor proper 
to the occasion. " May our endeavours to please 
be crowned with success " — that was the humour 
of it. I was so eager for this that I never thought 
of pleasing myself : so it was a sort of double 
event of misapplied energy. I turned out stories, 
essays, these preferred, skits, sketches, anything 
that came into my mind, as distinct from coming 
out of it, and, of course, I had nothing but failures 
to my credit. My little trading ventures came back 
without having found a market, or reported them- 
selves total losses by simply keeping silent as to 
their fate. Once I thought the luck had turned 
with a conditional acceptance of a desperate 



LITTLE GRUB STREET 53 

article on clocks and watches. It was worked up 
from " the usual sources of information " in the 
public libraries, and offered to the editor of The 
Clerkenwell News, then in its modest beginnings as 
a mere trade organ, with a good advertising con- 
nection of parochial extent. It came out, in fitful 
instalments, almost repeating the count of the 
weeks it had taken me to write. I got nothing 
for it, and by arrangement : there lay the sting. 
" We don't pay for this sort of thing," said the 
editor genially, and he seemed to say with the 
man in Dickens : " you are very young, sir," as 
he looked me in the face. And I did get something 
after all — print ! Delicious intoxicant ! beyond 
poppy and mandragora as medicine for the sleep 
sweetened by dreams of fame. 

Then came the awakening : The Clerkenwell 
News wanted no more ; the other periodicals 
maintained their steady demand for peace and 
quietness ; the ten pounds had nearly melted 
away. I stretched myself full length on the floor, 
and thought I could have made a better world. 

I had but one confidant in all this time of trial : 
my old associate at Wyon's who had started the 
scheme of the Anglo-French Working Class Ex- 
hibition. He was an erratic creature, with a streak 
of genius in his composition that might have 
matured into achievement, but for want of ballast. 
How we rambled the streets together and talked 
of all things wise and foolish since we talked of 
our hopes. Fine chances were actually reserved 
for him, but not yet. It was one day to be his 
luck to capture The Times, then a paper almost 



54 MY HARVEST 

hymned by our ruling class as a blessing from 
above. The occasion was a letter, a column long, 
on the franchise, from the pen of a Conservative 
working man. It was the sensation of the hour. 
The great agitation for Reform was well afoot with 
John Bright as its prophet, and the workmen as 
the class clamouring for the vote : the Hyde Park 
Railings were to fall in the struggle, though as yet 
they were safe. The writer of the letter came as a 
sort of Providential deserter to the enemy. It was 
signed " Robert Coningsby," his real name, and 
it brought with it a flavour of the Disraelian ideals, 
the sons of toil ranged under the aristocracy as 
their natural leaders. He had naturally the trick 
of the pen. I remember one striking passage : 
" We will have no king but Caesar." He had 
moreover, benefited by the educational patronage 
of Mr. Martin, the founder of the long historic law 
suit, Martin v, Mackonochie, or Low Church v. 
High. Democrat as he was by his humble birth 
and calling, he was quite an aristocrat in his im- 
patience of a superior. He was determined to 
arrive, and he took this as the nearest way. And 
arrive he did after a fashion : within a few years 
of that time he was a war correspondent on the 
staff of The Times, whose editor had kept his eye 
on him ever since the famous letter. It was a 
tremendous rise for one who had started as a 
mechanic in a paper cap, in our lower premises at 
Wyon's where they struck the medals at huge 
presses, after roasting them red hot over roaring 
fires between stage and stage of the process. He 
had the utmost contempt for the political leaders 



LITTLE GRUB STREET 55 

of his own class, with whom he had coquetted for 
an opening in their ranks only to find them wedged 
tight to keep him out — a miniature Disraeli in fact. 
At one time, fired by the success of his Anglo-French 
Exhibition, he invented for himself a sort of mission 
to the United States, actually had an audience of 
the President, and I believe sat at meat with him 
at the White House. I remember a triumphant 
letter from him on the theme of " how's this for 
high." 

I fancy it was in his blood : Hardy has told us 
that, if you want really all that is left of many 
of the oldest families, you must look for them 
among the humblest of the people. It was so in 
his case : a pure artisan in manners and customs, 
there was yet " a something about him," backed 
by a family tradition of origins. There was dis- 
tinction in his cast of feature — the Roman beak, 
the full eye and short upper lip ; and with it a 
good manner when he cared to put it on. Add to 
this an easy possession of his h's, a feat, in the 
circumstances of his upbringing. He sang well, 
and he could throw himself into a love ballad with 
a conviction hard to withstand. As an offset, he 
loved beer, as he used to say because there were 
no bones in it, drank it turn and turn with a mate 
out of the same pewter, and was a great trencher- 
man at every kind of feasting within his reach. 
In spite of all, a captivating companion for man 
or woman, especially the latter, a Lassalle in shirt- 
sleeves. His conceit of himself was colossal ; his 
temper uncontrollable ; he would ruin the best 
chances with a hasty word. 



56 MY HARVEST 

In one of our walks, when I was downcast with 
the contemplation of the last shot in the locker 
of my hoard, we saw a contents bill of The Pall 
Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of Frederic 
Greenwood. It claimed our attention for " A Night 
in a Workhouse — by an Amateur Casual." It was 
appetizing : the Gazette was the smartest thing in 
journalism, written by gentlemen for gentlemen, 
on the plan sketched in jest by Thackeray in one 
of his happy excursions of satirical fancy. Green- 
wood had taken the hint and turned it into the 
living reality of a new evening paper. 

His brother James was the Amateur Casual ; 
and the pair had carefully worked out their scheme 
of a descent by a dandy into the social shades. 
The Amateur took care to tell us that he had been 
driven down in his editor's brougham, and in slum 
toggery, to the purlieus of the workhouse, and 
there dropped to see how it felt to be an outcast. 
The rest was business of the usual sort — dainty 
disgust of the associations, the food, and above 
all of the compulsory bath. The instalments sold 
as fast as they could be printed : it was the sensa- 
tion of the day. We bought our paper, revelled 
in it over our pipes, and were separating after a 
midnight sitting when my friend started a happy 
thought. Dives had gone to have a look at Lazarus ; 
why should not Lazarus return the compliment, in 
The Evening Star, the organ of the other side ? 
I rose to it ; and we agreed that we should each 
try it on his own account, and send in the article 
that seemed to shape best. 

We parted on that ; and next day I set to work. 



LITTLE GRUB STREET 57 

It wrote itself in a manner : I was so taken with 
the idea. The machinery was of the simplest ; it 
took the form of " A Night in Belgrave Square — 
by a Costermonger." In the details, of course, 
I claimed the full benefit of all the chartered 
liberties of farce. The coster was smuggled into 
the fine house as a guest, by a friend engaged as 
an extra hand for the service of a great dinner. 
He borrowed his uniform for the occasion, drove 
to the rendezvous in his barrow, left in a bye- 
street, passed muster because the host and hostess, 
having separate lists as the result of a tiff, were 
each under the impression that he came on the 
other's invitation. For him the gathering was but 
one long torment of pity for a fallen state of social 
enjoyment, " feller creeturs " with no genuine 
interest in each other, and " so cold like they seemed 
to give me the spasms." He escaped from it to 
bread and cheese and an onion, and registered a 
vow of " never again." 

As soon as it was done, I rushed off with it to 
our rendezvous, and threw it at my chum for a 
catch. 

" There's mine : where's yours ? " 

" Haven't begun it yet : met a little party : you 
know." 

" I say ! look alive about it, or we shall miss our 
chance." 

" Why won't yours do ? Let's see." He glanced 
over it, handed it back to me : " That's all right ; 
we'll walk down and drop it in the box." 

Four-and-twenty hours later and London was in 
a rash of a new poster — this time of The Evening 



58 MY HARVEST 

Star — " A Night in Belgrave Square — by a Coster- 
monger," in big capitals, and with the bill all to 
itself. I hurried off to show it to him, but he was 
before me of course with his own copy. We dis- 
cussed plans for new articles. I was for falling 
back on rejected contributions. " Nothing of that 
sort," he said ; " why go further afield ? Go on with 
the Costermonger, and make him a character — ^the 
Coster here, there and everywhere in a survey of 
the whole scheme of things. What have you and I 
been talking about all this time ? And you the 
worst, with your everlasting sense of contrasts 
between high and low, wise and simple, rich and 
poor." He was right : the one thing I had never 
thought of writing about was the thing that was 
nearest to my heart. The shyness of the pen is 
sometimes the most invincible of all. He had 
helped me to find myself. 

And so to bed, but not to sleep for the throb of 
thoughts. The Press had claimed me for its own. 



CHAPTER V 

FLEET STREET 

AT the end of the week the cashier handed me 
two guineas with the expression of a hope 
that it might only be the beginning of our rela- 
tions. It was the first wage for work of this kind 
I had ever touched, and, as such, it had a most 
beneficial effect on my spirits. It seemed to lift 
me at a bound out of the amateur class. The 
compliments of my new patrons must be sincere, 
for they had backed their opinions with their 
money. My friend and I cracked a bottle over it ; 
and with this and other rejoicings the gold was 
soon reduced to small change. 

Then came an introduction to the staff. Justin 
McCarthy sent for me, and I was presented in 
due form as one who was going to be *' one of us." 
I felt like the initiate of a priesthood. These were 
writers ; and in my callow state of mind the people 
who regularly got into print had suffered the 
mystic change into something that was almost 
sacramental. 

Their chief was well calculated to inspire this 
feeling with the charm of his manner. As I have 
said of him elsewhere, " Pleased with thyself whom 
everyone can please," might have been written of 
Justin McCarthy. It would, however, have to be 

59 



60 MY HARVEST 

understood in its best sense. There was nothing 
of the self-satisfaction of vanity in his inexhaustible 
amiability. It sprang from a genuine charity, 
a genuine joy in being and in doing, as good 
things. 

As a writer he had incomparable ease ; and for 
once, though by way of exception, this made easy 
reading for others. The maxim on which he con- 
sistently acted in all the labours of composition 
was that a man need never seek to do more than 
his level best. Something of his essentially Celtic 
temperament perhaps went into this theory. In- 
numerable columns of print, and pages as the 
leaves of Vallombrosa, did not seem to leave a 
wrinkle on his brow, or to add or take a tint from 
the pure white and red of his complexion. If he 
had to lecture, he went straight to his work without 
a thought about it except in the general scheme. 
His solicitude never extended to the form, and 
still less, if possible, to the expression. He spoke 
out of a full mind and left all the rest to take care 
of itself. 

It was the same later on with his speeches in 
the House. With a better voice, he would have 
left his mark as an orator. As it was he too often 
seemed to be speaking " to his own beard." But 
the substance of what he said was admirable within 
the limits of excellence which Nature and choice 
had assigned to him. Ease was the principle of his 
literary being. His prodigious memory was stored 
with cases in point from two or three literatures, 
from which he could quote by chapter and verse. 
He quoted freely, because he enjoyed freely ; his 



FLEET STREET 61 

reading had manifestly agreed with him. He 
had taken his authors, as he took men of flesh and 
blood, as good fellows whose best things, whether 
they told for or against him, were infinitely in- 
teresting as products of human power. Geniality 
was his note. He seemed to write with the softest 
of swan quills dipped in a fluid of milk and honey, 
without an effort, without a pang, till the task was 
done. He instinctively avoided all those parts of 
his subject that might give himself, or his readers, 
a headache. It was all picture, suggestion, felicity 
of phrase. In this way he produced his prodigious 
output of journalism and of magazine literature. 
The mere titles of his topics would tax the industry 
of a German compiler. He seemed to have written 
on everything that was stirring in his time — 
politics, literature, philosophy, manners. 

His very limitations were means to an end : 
nature was fashioning the author of A History of 
Our Own Times. " One is helped in writing 
history," he said, " by being a novelist." That 
really remarkable work was in a new style of what 
may be called middle history — the glittering bird's- 
view of the candidatures for immortality in the 
history to come. It was not profound ; it was not 
learned ; it was not problem in politics or morals ; 
it was a genial, tolerant survey of an epoch, written 
without a trace of party, for the benefit of those 
who sometimes have to read as they run ; and such 
are the bulk of mankind. It was commissioned by 
one publishing house, and then retiu-ned — on pay- 
ment of a handsome compensation — in a cold fit 
of alarm as to the effect, on the book market, of his 



62 MY HARVEST 

championship in Parhament of Home Rule. With 
a smile and a shrug, he at once offered it to another 
house, and it made the tour of the English-speaking 
world. The publisher of little faith lost no time in 
going into sackcloth and ashes, but the mischief 
was done. 

The success of the original issue was immediate 
and prodigious. The author's royalties in this 
country realized sums that were only to be written 
in five figures. If there had been copyright in the 
United States at the time of its publication, he 
might have retired on a competence from this one 
production alone. But, alas ! political life had 
claimed him for its own ; and the cause of Ireland 
was the altar on which he laid the sacrifice of his 
fortune. As he went deeper and deeper into 
politics he had, of course, less and less time for the 
labours of the desk. His income fell off, and all 
possibility of saving was brought to an end by the 
direful catastrophe of the Irish Exhibition. He 
had guaranteed that ill-starred undertaking, which 
had Olympia for the scene of its failure, and he 
was one of the few of his associates whose position 
made them profitable game for the creditor. He 
was bled, and bled, and bled again by process of 
law, and as fast as the veins were replenished by 
his industry they were drained once more. 

But all this was yet to be when I joined in the 
halcyon days. On Saturdays we often supped at 
his house in Kennington, then still touched with 
rural charm. These entertainments were to my 
limited experience as feasts of the gods. William 
Black was of the company, when he was not away 



FLEET STREET 63 

on correspondence during the Prusso- Austrian war 
of 1856. Black was soon to try his hand at the 
novel. His first attempt, I believe, in that form 
was called Love or Marriage, prudently suppressed 
afterwards when his works were collected for the 
canon. It was among the first of the risky stories, 
the " or " turning on the supposition that the two 
states might be deadly opposites, and that you had 
to make your choice. It came into the office for 
review ; and the task fell to the lot of Cooper, then 
sub-editor, and afterwards editor of The Scotsman, 
" Governor," he said to the chief, " I've done my 
best for it ; but — oh ! " McCarthy himself was 
then in the running for the prizes of fiction. Most 
of his work in that line, as in others, was bright and 
optimistic, a tender love story ending with wedding 
bells, and interspersed with sketches of life as it is 
lived on the public scene, in foreign travel, or in 
the social round, all taken at its face value. If 
there was a touch of envy anywhere, it was only in 
the breast of his beautiful and charming wife. She 
never could get quite used to Black's success in 
subsequent works, especially in A Daughter of Heth 
that started him on the triumphs of his career. 
For her, " Justin " had struck the note, and there 
could not possibly be any departure from it, con- 
sistently with what were then regarded as the 
sanctities of the home. She was the hostess at our 
Saturday suppers, with no rival of her own sex, 
and only with adorers of ours. 

We saw something of the children — Justin 
Huntly in the knickerbocker stage, the daughter 
Charlotte a callow little thing in frocks and sashes, 



64 MY HARVEST 

with something of the wondering look of one of 
Raffael's cherubs making a first acquaintance with 
a planet of sorts. These children lived the life of 
their parents to the full. When still early in their 
teens, if not before, they had seen most of the plays 
and operas, travelled here, there and everywhere 
on the Continent, and ransacked their father's 
library at will. Later on, Justin Huntly, if not in 
knickerbockers, still without a hair on his chin, 
was once met at his father's door alighting from a 
hansom, with a pile of Balzacs for his luggage. 
He was going to review the master from start to 
finish, by way of trying his luck with it in one of 
the magazines. 

Russell of Liverpool, Sir Edward now if you 
please, was another of our band. He then wrote 
the Parliamentary leader for The Star, in the Press 
gallery of the House — paragraph by paragraph as 
he distilled the whole moral of the distracting 
business in the course of the debate. His private 
and personal solace in literature was the drama, 
as associated with the genius and fortunes of Henry 
Irving. He did for Irving what he did for the 
debates, discovered his true significance, and gave 
him his place in the critical estimates of the time, 
lectured on him, and every now and then produced 
a solid and thoughtful pamphlet in which he 
chronicled the growth of his powers. 

Among others destined to future distinction, we 
had Wilson, a young Irishman from Cork — Alpha- 
bet Wilson we used to call him by reason of the 
number of letters, E. D. J., to his name. He was 
then a writer of leaders for The Star, and an 



FLEET STREET 65 

ardent Nationalist, so ardent that McCarthy could 
hardly drive him without the curb. Afterwards 
he became chief leader writer for The Times, and 
took an active part in the campaign against Home 
Rule that bore the title of ParneUism and Crime. 
The blood-curdling revelations under that heading 
were not by his hand : he only drove the moral 
of them home in the leader columns. He was 
altogether an extraordinary person. He was widely 
and deeply read in the classics and in modern 
tongues, and he had a mind that could pick up the 
pin of anecdote, or lift the weight of a whole thesis 
in politics, philosophy or history. He wrote im- 
peccable prose, at the pace of something driven 
by steam, rarely blotted a line, and in that, as in 
all other respects, was the ideal journalist in the 
perfection of his powers. I include in the estimate 
a thorough conviction in his abandonment oi the 
Radical cause. He did not turn his coat : he 
changed it. The new faith was as much a matter 
of conscience, and say also of feeling, with him as 
the old. I can testify to that, for it was the subject 
of many a hot dispute between us which our mutual 
friendship never allowed to degenerate into a 
quarrel. I doubted his judgment, I never had 
cause to doubt his honesty. I own to a partiality 
in my estimate, for all that : he was ever the soul 
of friendship with me. He lived on to fight the 
battle of his paper to its disastrous close, and 
finally retired on a liberal allowance, but not to his 
hoped-for rest in the evening of life. He had pro- 
jected an important political work, for the occupa- 
tion of his leisure, but suddenly his great powers 



66 MY HARVEST 

seemed to fail him with a snap, and after that came 
labour and sorrow before they were due by his 
count of years. The Times gave him an obituary 
column : the world at large seemed hardly aware 
of his loss. It was the system of anonymity at its 
worst. For the better part of half a century his 
pen had influenced, for good or ill, the policy of 
the empire, but his work bore no signature, and 
only the newspaper offices, and the Parliament 
men, could put a name to it. For multitudinous 
readers in every quarter of the globe, he was hardly 
so much as a great unknown, since this implies at 
least the knowledge that there is a concrete some- 
thing to ignore. In France, such a man might 
easily have aspired to ministerial honours, or to 
an embassy, and he could not possibly have failed 
of his Officer's Cross. As it was, the very ruck of 
the music-hall stage would have eclipsed him 
easily in notoriety, while the cruel conditions under 
which he wrote denied him fame. 

I now settled down to my Costermonger articles, 
carrying the character here, there and everywhere 
in a comprehensive glance at the life of his betters. 
He found his way into the Strangers' Gallery for 
a night in Parliament, then in the turmoil of the 
new Reform debates. He even drew up a Reform 
Bill of his own. He attended the great Trades' 
Demonstration of 1866 when some sixty thousand 
working men marched in perfect order through the 
West End ironically saluting the Tory clubs as 
they passed. He went to the Derby ; he dined 
with the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House ; he 
ran over to Calais for a look at the French, in a 



FLEET STREET 67 

walking torn* to the Belgian frontier. He professed 
to know all about the table talk at one of the 
Greenwich whitebait dinners of the Cabinet, even 
then in the period of their decline. He said his 
say on the horrors of war during the struggle 
between Austria and Prussia, on the Indian famine, 
and what not. The articles were afterwards re- 
published in book form, as Mr. Sprouts, His 
Opinions, with a grateful dedication to Robert 
Coningsby as the only begetter. The little volume 
had its day, and then deservedly sank into oblivion. 
It was immature to the last degree, but it is still of 
interest to the writer as a record of the best he 
could do at that time in the criticism of life. 

A further interest lies in the fact that it was 
in the Bohemian note, at a time when the Bohemia 
of the Press was beginning to be a thing of the 
past. The institution was just kept going by a few 
convivial clubs all based on the idea that the 
self-respecting writer was bound to be a bit of a 
wastrel in his private hours. With most, this was 
no more than lip service to a social cult in its dotage, 
and it was consistent with the decorum of the 
home and wholesome family life. One club held 
its meetings in the Gothic chamber over the gate- 
way of the old military monastery of St. John of 
Jerusalem, in Clerkenwell. Many actors were of 
the membership, and one of the sights for visitors 
was Marston, a fashionable ghost in Hamlet, 
smoking his midnight pipe after playing in the 
piece with Phelps at Sadler's Wells. Like Mrs. 
Siddons before him, he ordered his very refresh- 
ments in a sepulchral tone. Black once violated 



68 MY HARVEST 

the club rule of secrecy in a fancy sketch of harm- 
less pleasantries. There was a Vagrants' Club, 
with its profession of faith in a club song of which 
a precious fragment still remains in my memory : — 

I'm a vagrant, 

Thou'rt a vagrant, 
Vagrants too are he and she : 

We are vagrants, 

Ye are vagrants, 
And where are they as wouldn't be ? 
Three groans for them — as wouldn't be. 

However, we contrived to believe that we believed 
every word of it, till the last note of the chorus had 
died away. 

There was an Arundel Club for the theatrical 
critics, which slowly opened one eye at about 
midnight, and became wide awake an hour or so 
later when all the copy was in the printer's hands. 
There was a Circle Club, chiefly for Academy 
students, with Waterlow Ouless and Buckman 
among its members. And there was, of course, 
the Savage Club, which would need a whole book 
to itself, if it did not already possess it in the 
volume from the pen of Mr. Aaron Watson. 

Most of them merely took Bohemianism as a 
diversion : the few who still took it seriously were 
much to be pitied, for they suffered for their faith. 
Such a Bohemian, dyed in the wool, I remember 
going to see in the limbo of one of the sponging 
houses to which our old comedy owed so much. 
It was in Cursitor Street. I am glad I did not 
neglect my opportunity, for shortly after they all 
died the death, as the effect, direct or indirect, of 



FLEET STREET 69 

the Act of Parliament abolishing imprisonment 
for debt. Such imprisonment goes on all the same, 
with a difference, and that is quite enough for a 
mealy-mouthed generation. Formerly you were 
imprisoned for not paying your creditor : now you 
suffer for not obeying the Court that orders you 
to pay him. The Court determines the conditions 
of settlement according to its view of your means : 
your failLQ-e to comply with its order is " con- 
tempt." Holloway Prison still swarms with debtors, 
but they are there under another name, as wanton 
and wilful contemners of the law. It must make 
all the difference to them in adding to the enormity 
of their sense of guilt. The sponging house was 
a relic of the old class legislation with its thousand 
and one discriminations between common people 
and their betters. If you had absolutely nothing, 
you went into the jail for debtors, as long as they 
cared to pay for keeping you there ; if you could 
pay your way for awhile, you had the option of a 
sort of private lodging-house where you might 
receive your friends, and try to settle matters 
before final committal to prison. The lodging- 
house keeper, as a bailiff, was also your jailer, 
responsible for your safe custody. You boarded 
with him, and ate, drank and smoked your full, 
all at famine prices. 

My friend was a well-known artist of the humbler 
sort. He illustrated the published music-hall songs 
of the day, with portraits of the singers in their 
habit as they lived in the glare of the footlights. 
One evening he missed the weekly meeting of The 
Vagrants, and the dismal news went round that 



70 MY HARVEST 

he had been taken to Cursitor Street. The Club 
decreed a visit of sympathy, and next day I was 
of the deputation. Locks, bolts and bars flew 
asunder to admit us, and then shot back again to 
make us sharers of his captivity till we took our 
leave. Two or three days' confinement, without 
exercise, and almost without light and air, had 
yellowed him to the prison colour. Much of the 
dirt of his environment was supplied gratis by the 
management, but his foul dressing-gown was, I 
believe, a luxury at charges. He essayed a smile 
on our entry, and croaked, "I'm a vagrant, 
thou'rt a vagrant," to show that his spirit was 
unbroken, but somehow it seemed to come from 
the wrong side of his mouth. 

On another occasion I wished our chairman at 
a certain club a cordial ' good night,' after a 
delightful evening. Twelve hours or so later I 
had unexpectedly to wish him ' good morning ' in 
the less bright clime of Whitecross Street prison 
for debt. He had just been arrested : I was there 
only as a visitor in quest of material for an article 
on the approaching demolition of the jail. It was 
an awkward moment. " You here ! " came simul- 
taneously from both of us. " Yes, I'm looking 
round," I said, not knowing how to better it on 
the spur of the moment. He reddened to the roots 
of his hair, and turned away. 

Yes, Bohemia was dying — and everywhere. 
Miirger even had to make it but a phase in the life 
of his merry men on their way to a career. Who 
killed its Cock Robin in our colder clime ? Some 
attribute the catastrophe to the Time spirit, 



FLEET STREET 71 

others to suburban trains. One famous club in 
London, long devoted to the cult, but now a 
model of all the virtues, still keeps a chartered 
libertine of Bohemia on its list of members, as 
a sort of pet. He, and he alone, may break every 
rule of the institution at his pleasure, but woe to 
anybody else who breaks so much as a single one. 
There is a sort of vanity in the culture of all such 
relics of a shady past. The revivalists of two 
American cities, I remember, once contended for 
the honour of having brought the very worst of 
sinners " within the fold." The Lake City began 
it by injudicious boasts of a certain wicked man 
in Chicago as the wickedest man in America. The 
commercial capital immediately set up an ex- 
wicked man of New York as holding the record for 
the planet. Other cities joined to make it a sort 
of four-handed game, and the respective cham- 
pions entered into the fray with becoming spirit. 
The Chicago specimen owned to wife-beating as 
a diversion : the New York one immediately 
trumped with having been the death of his mother, 
and won the trick and the rubber. 

One of the last Bohemians of my acquaintance 
on the Press was a young Scotsman who had been 
a comrade of Black in Glasgow, when London was 
merely an aspiration for both. With characteristic 
rashness he undertook to make the first venture, 
and to examine and report. He came and soon 
thought himself able to assure his friend that it 
was a safe thing. He was premature, but he 
yearned for company, and he had actually earned 
a trifle by penny dreadfuls that kept him going for 



72 MY HARVEST 

a time. Black accordingly started but not, of 
course, with any destinies of that kind in view. 
The other was at the railway station to meet him, 
and carried him off to his own dingy lodging, in 
old Sam Johnson's Bolt Court, for refreshment. 
After a high tea, the host proposed making a night 
of it to celebrate the occasion. Black coldly 
declined, and drawing a short story from his wallet 
sat down to finish it for the night's post. Their 
meeting was in fact but a parting of the ways. 
The host finally sank into the humblest offices of 
the Press, with the infirmary for his last stage. 
I make no imputation of sudden desertion or neglect 
on Black's part ; the other, I fear, became simply 
impossible in the long run. His visitor was soon 
on the flowing tide of an engagement and paying 
work. 

Even Sala, prince of Bohemians, lived to mend 
his ways. He began as a primeval " Savage," he 
ended at the Reform Club, immaculate in the 
smartness of the day. He was of great service to 
that institution as an acknowledged authority on 
good eating and drinking. Wine lists had no 
secret for him, and he was such a judge of cookery 
that when the club wanted a new chef he was sent 
to Paris in solemn mission to find the right man. 
We were both at the dinner given to Dickens, on 
his second visit to the States to " make it up " for 
American Notes. It was a gathering of famous 
persons of the time, and it filled the great hall at 
the Freemasons' Tavern to the full. Bulwer was 
in the chair, and for other figures, now seen as 
in Ta dream, we had Maclise the painter, Henry 



FLEET STREET 73 

Thompson the famous surgeon, Jacob Omnium 
the indefatigable writer of letters to The Times 
on every topic under the sun, to say nothing of 
hundreds that have faded from memory as nearly 
all have faded from life. Praise of the guest of the 
evening was of course on every tongue, but when 
it came to the item of his services to the public as 
the founder of Household Words, and as a con- 
tributor of the best to its pages, Sala, who had 
been perfectly abstemious and alert during the 
evening, as though awaiting the honourable men- 
tion of his own name, began to dissent with an 
ominous growl. It was understood to signify that 
the best in that periodical was from his own pen. 
He had certainly done well for it, with many an 
article of marked brilliancy and charm. But the 
growl was disconcerting for all that, especially 
as it grew deeper and deeper till it seemed to 
betoken some peculiarly alarming escape from the 
Zoo. Friendly keepers, however, were happily at 
hand, to persuade him to compound the matter by 
an occasional groan. 

For all that he was a notable figure of the day. 
The hour and the man came together when the 
Lawsons resolved on the great venture of a daily 
newspaper at a penny. Its appeal was naturally 
to the million, and the million had wants and 
tastes of its own. Sala found the note — omnis- 
cience, set off with abundant illustration, and 
inexhaustible fertility of quip and crank. He 
became the literary parent of all the young lions of 
The Daily Telegraph, who succeeded each other in 
unbroken line until they had made the fortune of 



74 MY HARVEST 

its discerning owner. The new journalism of that 
epoch had come to town. A newer now reigns in 
The Daily Mail, but The Telegraph has known how 
to change with the circumstances, without once 
faihng to find the formula for success. It has 
tapped new sources as a sort of family paper in 
excelsis for the comfortable classes. Their law of 
life is the avoidance of shock either to mind or 
body, and " something to read " that keeps them 
at once calm and amused, like Buddhas with a 
sense of a joke in public affairs. How things change, 
and, notoriously, how, in their essence, they are 
ever the same. 

About this time I settled myself in chambers as 
being more in keeping with the claims of my new 
life. I took two sky parlours in Lincoln's Inn 
Fields, another bit of old London in harmony with 
all my most pleasurable associations, and I put 
my name on the door. I came and went as I 
pleased, with no troublesome formality of knock 
or ring : and at night time I had the roomy, gloomy 
old building all to myself, with the exception of the 
housekeeper in the basement — ancient of days like 
the rest. It was on the same side as the chambers 
of the unfortunate Mr. Tulkinghorn ; and his fate 
somehow gave it an added charm. One could never 
tell what might not be happening to some successor 
of his in the same set, as one sat in the small hours 
of the morning, browsing on Bleak House, or study- 
ing the dramatists of the Restoration in their 
habitat. My father now knew of the change in my 
mode of life, and accepted it, without giving it his 
formal sanction. He treated all my other activities 



FLEET STREET 75 

in the same way, never once, so far as I know, saw 
article or book of my doing, and certainly never 
alluded to either in any shape or way. But he 
was a good father still, and we remained the best 
of friends, while keeping this open secret of silence 
between us to the end of his days. 



CHAPTER VI 
PARIS AGAIN 

MY next commission for the paper was al- 
together to my Hking — Paris for the ex- 
hibition of 1867. It was the most impressive of 
all the exhibitions in France, perhaps also in the 
whole world. Others had larger acreage ; and I 
am especially not unaware of the claims of 
Chicago both in that and in beauty. But this 
one synchronized with world-shaking events. The 
empire, while still making a brave show of it, 
was really worm-eaten at the core. The persistent 
pounding of the opposition had at last told on 
the stability of the throne. The " crowning of the 
edifice " with liberal institutions was already 
marked for failure. Without, there was the terrible 
menace of the United States as the champion of 
Mexico. The Civil War was over, but the land 
swarmed with hardy veterans ready to back the 
demand for the withdrawal of the French garrison. 
Prussia had succeeded France as the friend in need 
of Italian independence, and France herself had 
to become a party to the Austrian cession of 
Venetia, doubly humiliating because Bismarck had 
openly rejected her claim to territorial compensa- 
tion. In one hemisphere or the other, France 
was threatened by great powers, the coming 

76 



PARIS AGAIN 77 

" Germany " and the restored Union in full stride. 
The States were the first to prevail : Maximilian 
was left to his fate. 

The exhibition was still in mid course when the 
tragedy of Queretaro came as an omen for the 
eyes of all. Up to that time the crowd was still 
content to take Napoleon III at his own valuation. 
With all the world dancing attendance at his 
monster garden party, it was hard to believe that 
he was not doing very well, for, within the ring 
fence of the Champ-de-Mars, there was everything 
to charm the senses and the mind. As a sup- 
plementary wonder, the glittering show at court 
included some of the greatest monarchs and 
statesmen of the world — ^the King of Prussia 
among them and Moltke as the intelligent tourist 
looking on. Even this was not solely for the 
favoured few : the others had their share of sight- 
seeing from the kerbstone. When you left the 
Champ-de-Mars you went into the Champs 
Elysees or the Bois, for a promenade of princely 
splendours that seemed to have come straight out 
of fairyland. Yet in three years or so from that 
time the Napoleons were in captivity or in exile, 
and their palace was a heap of smouldering 
ruins. 

But it was good going while it went. I associate 
it with long lingering summer afternoons in which 
the dust was golden haze, and the elliptical galleries 
one within the other, filled with the wonders of 
the world, were a new variety of Aladdin's palace. 
It was the Arabian Nights in the very sharpness of 
the contrasts, stately achievements in architecture 



78 MY HARVEST 

if only in stucco, flanked by pitches for wizards 
and conjurors. The outermost ring was reserved 
for the refreshment booths of all nations, some of 
their staffs distinctly home made, with only a 
costume to keep them in character — ^Turegs from 
the Place Pigalle, Arabs from Montmartre. I 
remember a Tunisian cafe in charge of a pair of 
turbaned Turks, undoubtedly genuine as being 
dyed by the sun instead of burnt cork, and guard- 
ing a bevy of odalisques who were to be regarded 
by the eye of faith as Circassian slaves, exquisitely 
trousered in satin and with short jackets to match. 
One of these presently took up a guitar to sing, 
as though to soothe her captivity. We expected 
something from the Persian at the very least : all 
we had — foreign as it still might be to most of the 
audience — was to my trained ear nothing in the 
world but, " Where are you going, my pretty 
maid ? " rendered in the twang of the Cockney 
gutter. 

" What lingo do you call that ? " I said to the 
waiter as he flashed past. — ''n'sais-pas M'sieu: du 
Tunisien, hein I — ' JJn hock, houm / ' " I kept the 
professional secret : at any rate she was a com- 
patriot. 

Then there was a Chinese giant with his Chinese 
wife (small-footed), and a Tartar dwarf for comic 
relief. The showman, touched by my intelligent 
curiosity, invited me to lunch with them in private. 
Ah, if more luncheon parties were like that ! It 
was so delightfully unconventional ; all real, and 
unrehearsed, especially by the dwarf. As the old 
lady said during the Bulgarian massacres " they 



PARIS AGAIN 79 

don't call 'em Turks for nothing." A Tartar he 
was, to be sure, with the years of manhood, but 
the manners of a spoiled child, and as beseemed 
his size, the most aggressive person it has ever 
been my lot to meet at the board of hospitality. 
It was one of his bad days, as our host explained. 
He snatched at the viands ; he screamed insolent 
defiance at the giant, and when seized by the 
gullet in remonstrance he could still foam at the 
mouth. Then, something going wrong in the 
attempt to render one of his outlandish dishes 
in the medium of French cookery, he began to 
flourish a table knife with intent, till he was carried 
howling from the room, blaspheming in gutturals 
that made the blood run cold. 

Regarding him as a kind of superfluous hors 
d'ceuvre, I found the rest of the entertainment 
extremely interesting. From first to last the small- 
footed lady was a problem study in speechless 
disgust with things in general, not without some- 
thing to show for it — as I learned when my host 
obligingly gave me her story. 

" You see, I picked up Chang — that was the 
giant's name — and the little 'un at Canton, and 
we were almost ready to get aboard when some- 
body suggested that, to make the whole show 
absolutely unique, we ought to have a small- 
footed lady. No sooner said than done. I 
advanced the giant the needful for a wedding 
present, and told him to get married at once. He 
shook his head, and said he was only making the 
tour to get enough cash to wed the girl of his choice. 
' As many as you please, but we must have this 



80 MY HARVEST 

one for the gate-money.' He didn't like it, I 
could see that ; but he took it as part of the day's 
work, and set out to go a-courting in the Chinese 
way. 

" It was pretty simple. He soon found a Chinese 
father who was ready for a deal ; and after com- 
pliments, but without saying a word about the 
marriage, begged his acceptance of a friendly gift. 
The parent was profuse in acknowledgments, and 
asked him if there was anything he could offer in 
return. 'You have a daughter,' said the wooer; 
' may I ask if she has a small foot ? ' ' That is 
so,' returned the parent with modest pride ; ' our 
family has seen better days.' ' I want a wife,' 
said the giant. ' Why certainly,' replied the other, 
' with all the pleasure in life.' ' Might I be per- 
mitted to see the foot in advance,' said the cautious 
buyer ; ' not, of course, that I doubt your word.' 
The girl was brought in. She was veiled, but that 
didn't matter : any face would do. The parent 
explained the situation, and she lifted the hem of 
her robe and disclosed the deformity in all its 
perfection. In a few hours, we were all on our 
way to Paris for the honeymoon." 

From that moment, it seems, or at any rate, 
as soon as they reached their destination, the poor 
thing's foot was the curse of her life. The show 
was crowded ; and all for the sake of the small- 
footed lady as the principal item. The giant 
became a mere side show, though he did a fair 
trade in selling his signature at half a franc. The 
dwarf fared somewhat better, by reason of his 
shape — all breadth without length — and of his 



PARIS AGAIN 81 

fiendish ugliness as of a porcelain monster realized 
in flesh and blood. The bride had to lift the hem 
of her garment, let us say some one or two or three 
hundred times a day, on the requisition of any 
visitor to the show. She did it without a word of 
protest, but evidently in a smoulder of sullen 
wrath ; and her misery of degradation, for so I 
understood it, went on till closing time. The 
women, in their innocence of the state of her feelings, 
were the worst offenders. A few tried to pinch 
the foot, but at that she flamed up, and was only 
to be appeased by a placard in several tongues : 
"Please don't touch." 

The day after the luncheon, on the strength of 
my intimacies behind the scenes, I undertook to 
pilot a party to the show, and advanced briskly to 
the Chinese lady to offer my compliments. She 
had remained utterly silent during the meal, so 
I now ventured on: "Do you speak English?" 
by way of an opening. She spoke enough for me : 
" You know I no spikkie you naughty mans " 
was all I got for my pains. With the possible 
exception of the Emperor Napoleon, she was per- 
haps the only person in Paris just then who wished 
the whole exhibition at the bottom of the sea. 
For her, there was a double degradation in the 
unveiling of her shoe and the unveiling of her face. 
It was a comely face, in its contours, though 
rather too much like a portrait painted on an 

Everybody had to come to Paris for this festival : 
the appeal was almost as world-wide as that of 1851. 
I met many persons of note at the house of the 



82 MY HARVEST 

correspondent of my paper. He held the strange 
office of reader for the censor, in one of the minis- 
tries : it was his business to look through the 
English journals, as they arrived by the morning 
mail, and to blue pencil them for anything that 
might be of interest for the Government. Occa- 
sionally he had to mark for an attack on the 
Imperial system. In this case, the whole issue had 
to suffer the humiliation of the blacking brush. 
The offending passage was obliterated by some 
mechanical process that rendered it perfectly 
illegible. And this in the cite lumiere ! These 
grotesque practices survive in some parts, as signs 
of certain strata of the growth of civilization and 
of common sense. In Petrograd, for instance, you 
ask for your English paper at the hotel, and probably 
receive it with its news of Russia and its leader all 
blotched with these hideous disfigurements. 

Our correspondent was a man of letters, author 
of a book or two, and over and above that, one 
of the best fellows in the world. He had lived 
so long in Paris that in manners, and even in 
speech, he was more than half a Frenchman. He 
cherished interesting superstitions, one of them a 
relic of the practice of divination by birds. In 
emergencies, he was wont to consult a canary in 
his study for the luck of the issue. It was a solemn 
rite. He coaxed the creature to his work with the 
promise of a lump of sugar, and immediately 
received a tiny packet picked at random from a 
store in the cage. This contained the message of 
the oracle. Like other deliverances of the same 
order, all depended on the interpretation ; and 



PARIS AGAIN 83 

in this way it generally presaged the luck he desired. 
The custom is still widespread in Italy, the store- 
house and museum of so many of the beliefs of 
the race. Until quite a few years ago it flourished 
in London, as one of the minor industries of Hatton 
Garden. The parchment-skinned crone, too old 
to drag the organ, could still earn a trifle at the 
street corner with her divining bird. 

The correspondence was conducted on a system 
of marital co-operation. The wife wrote the daily 
letter from dictation, as to the politics ; and, 
as to the social li>, collected the daily gossip 
of the Imperial fetes from friends who had the 
entry at the Tuileries. She was a sure guide 
in regard to the toilettes of the Empress, and 
the most successful creations of Worth. And this 
for a democratic sheet ! but one touch of fashion 
makes the whole world kin. She took incredible 
pains with it, rising sometimes with the sun to 
catch a reigning beauty in bed, for the details of 
last night's ball. 

At this house I met Ouida, who had brought 
letters of introduction. It was the Ouida of the 
days of youth, with everything about her the 
perfection of daintiness, excepting perhaps the 
rather too massive head which was the penalty 
she paid for her power with the pen. Her 
characteristic pose was not wanting — a hand laid 
with careful carelessness on the arm of the sofa, 
for the benefit of the company. Her conversation 
was like her attitude, another study in effects, 
this time in aristocratic sympathies. Her heroes 
of the moment were the leaders of the South in 



84 MY HARVEST 

the American Civil War, and in particular General 
Breckinridge. She gave him glowing, but still 
condescending praise, such as might have come 
from a partisan goddess watching the day's work 
on the plain of Troy. 

The dominant ideas of every period are usually 
reflected in its romance, without necessarily taking 
their rise in it. The novelist follows the thinker 
in rendering them into the terms of life. The 
sentimentalizing heroes of Bulwer's middle period 
marked our introduction to German studies under 
the influence of Carlyle. In Ouida's youth we 
began to change all this, at the bidding of Dr. 
Dasent in his translations from the Norse, all the 
more readily because this implied a new compli- 
ment to our noble selves. The strong man of the 
Sagas, suitably arranged for the drawing-room and 
the tea-table, began to stalk through our fiction 
with Mr. Rochester. 

Ouida followed suit. It was the same sort of hero, 
but with a dash of scent in peace time to heighten 
the effect of his Berserker rage in war or the 
chase. Her great rival was a writer known as 
The Author of Guy Livingstone, a character gener- 
ally and genially engaged in pulverizing everyone 
who came in his way. He grew tiresome in due 
course, only to return to favour in our day as the 
lawless superman of the existing school retouched 
to harmonize him with Nietzschean theories of a 
coming race. In the interval, it was poor Ouida's 
fate to suffer eclipse at the hands of Rhoda 
Broughton who was able to supply a new utility 
man for the drama of love. 



PARIS AGAIN 85 

Ouida was naturally much interested in her 
host, a man of family, and of air and elegance to 
match. He seemed, and I believe was, uncon- 
scious of the honour, but his wife took care that 
he should not remain so. One day, when he was 
hard at work on his letter, she stole softly into his 
study, and dropping a photograph of the charmer 
on his desk, as quietly withdrew. 

" What on earth's that for ? " came in irate 
tones from the desk. "Inspiration, dear," in dulcet 
tones from the door. 

Poor fellow ! he was one of the victims of the 
siege. A serious accident prevented him from 
leaving the city before the gates were closed, and 
the hardships and the want of proper nourishment 
did the rest. The devoted wife used afterwards 
to relate, with tears in her eyes, how hard set she 
was to find dainties for him. At last, I believe, 
in her desperation, she had to fall back on the 
canary. One pictures the little divining bird, in 
the slackness of business, pecking omens from 
habit and all unconsciously drawing his own. 

As I have said, it was good going while it lasted. 
The Empress was in the perfection of her beauty ; 
and the charm of mind was supplied in the salons 
of the Emperor's cousin, the Princess Mathilde, 
who had Flaubert, Taine, Dumas -fils, About, and 
Octave Feuillet in her little court. She was no 
niggard of these treasures, for sometimes, as 
women do with their fineries, she lent one to her 
other good cousin, by marriage, on the throne. 

Octave Feuillet, especially, was passed on to 
Eugenie in this way — perhaps as the safest of the 



86 MY HARVEST 

set for a person holding the Imperial position. 
His work was a blend of the risky situation and 
the moral reproof. Le Roman (Tun jeune Homme 
Pauvre, which placed him, overdid the moral in 
being somewhat superfluously correct, but he soon 
made good with Monsieur de Camors, the best 
example in his matured style. Monsieur was of 
those who are not a bit better than they should 
be, but he compensated by giving the heroine to 
understand that she was in the same plight. The 
indispensable touch of impropriety was still there, 
but it was impropriety on the stool of repentance, 
and the situation was saved to ethical ends. Both 
are hard reading now, the first especially as an 
impossible attempt to combine priggishness with 
fire. The other may still survive, as family reading 
tempered by the lock and key in the interest of the 
young person. It served to give the author his 
label as the " Musset of families." 

The Princess could afford to choose her stars for 
their brightness, and for that alone. As a matter 
of personal taste she drew the line at Republicans, 
and lost Sainte-Beuve in consequence, but with 
Taine and Renan in reserve, she was able to bear 
her lot with fortitude. 

The Princess of Metternich, wife of the Austrian 
Ambassador, was common to both circles. She 
was the enfant terrible of the Tuileries. Her 
private theatricals were a longing for all who had 
not the privilege of admission. Her note was the 
audacity of the music-hall, combined with the 
refinement of exalted station, the merry rattle at 
one moment, with the possibility of a quick change 



PARIS AGAIN 87 

in difficulties to the grande dame. Only she could 
have ventured to call the greatest of the Roths- 
childs her " domestic Jew," without any fear of 
the consequences. The Italian Countess of Cas- 
tiglione, who made her debut much in the same 
way, had the charm of beauty with a certain dash 
that was her substitute for wit. But when her 
looks faded, and other disappointments came, she 
withdrew in a kind of horror from the world. 
Madame de Pourtales, and Madame de Rattazzi 
helped to make things hum. 

The American Dr. Evans, dentist to the court, 
ought not to be overlooked in a survey of the 
social forces of the hour. His illustrious patients 
necessarily opened their mouths freely to him, 
and he learnt many a secret which he was able 
to turn to account in the advancement of his 
private fortunes, though in no corrupt way. He 
heard betimes, for instance, of the projected 
Avenue of the Empress, and bought up the ram- 
shackle properties on the line of route to resell 
at enormous profit when the time came. One of 
the vainest of men, he provided his own statue 
for his native city. It was a sort of co-operative 
scheme : he supplied the statue, and the munici- 
pality supplied the site. With all this he could 
be a good friend in the hour of need. As every- 
body knows, he came in very handy indeed when 
the Empress had to escape from the Tuileries 
during the disasters of the war. Her wretched 
servants were plundering the palace as she slipped 
out by a side door. 

But this was all to come ; and what a time it 



88 MY HARVEST 

was when the " crowned heads of Europe " were 
dropping in for the exhibition one by one, or as 
often as not two at a time. The Tsar and the 
King of Prussia overlapped in this way. The 
Prussians had thoughtfully sent one of their biggest 
guns to the show, and I daresay it found its way 
back a second time, for use, when Paris lay at 
the mercy of their siege artillery on the adjacent 
heights. The thrifty invaders might have saved 
money by warehousing it for their return. 

The fun was fast and furious. One of my 
recollections is of a grand dinner given by Emile 
de Girardin to the correspondents of the foreign 
papers, Whitehouse of The Daily Telegraph among 
them. He was a " feature " in his solemn affecta- 
tions, a kind of Malvolio rarely wanting in the 
austere regard of control. He seemed to be on 
the most confidential terms with the Emperor, and 
when he told us that His Majesty had driven out 
yesterday and enjoyed his dinner on his return, 
we were able to feel well informed. In the office, 
I believe, he was cherished, as a model for touch, 
by young lions in the 'prentice stage. 

Marie Roze, then in the plenitude of her beauty 
and charm, sang to us — a never-to-be-forgotten 
night. 

And, for the public scene, Schneider if you 
please, and Theresa, not to speak of "La Belle 
Ernestine," shepherdess and innkeeper at Etretat, 
then in course of discovery by Alphonse Karr. 
How focus it, except as a Cubist study in confusions 
with no focus at all. Seen in this perspective of 
years it reminds one of those compositions in the 



PARIS AGAIN 89 

confectioners' shops — pigmies of highly soluble sugar 
footing it with much confidence on an earth-crust 
of the same. 

On this second visit, I lived for awhile in the 
Batignolles. For me there is something classic in 
the simple and wholesome freedom of that district 
from all the affectations of style. It is for quite 
humble, if not exactly vulgar people — little em- 
ployees eking out a modest wage, third-rate actors 
playing in third-rate pieces, in a theatre to match. 
The man who cobbles your shoes in the daytime, 
may at night be a nobleman of drama with a small 
speaking part. It is, or at any rate was then, 
intimate, familiar, a bit dirty but snug, though at 
smug it drew the line. It had little back gardens, 
not without trees, in lieu of a stony cour, little 
ball-rooms in which you entered free, and paid a 
sou every time you danced, little restaurants where 
you dined at fabulously moderate prices on the 
understanding of no questions asked as to origins. 
Its people were a vast family, with little civilities, 
or at times little quarrels for their family tie : the 
porter's lodge was the clearing-house for the news 
of the whole quarter. 

I used to buy my paper of an old lady who kept 
a small stationer's shop, and who was occasionally 
assisted by a young one who kept the books. 
Quiet and soft-spoken this last, and timid till 
she came to know you well : then a chatterbox 
of the gentler sort. She got her living, such as it 
was, by giving lessons in something or other, taking 
her wages at the stationer's in the run of all the 
literature, periodical and other, of the stock-in-trade. 



90 MY HARVEST 

At rare intervals she gave a select tea party 
in the garden of her modest lodging hard by, and 
devoured her own refreshments in a way that 
suggested short commons as her normal fare. 

I lost sight of her when I lost sight of Paris, 
which happened for that occasion when I was 
recalled at the close of the exhibition. This led 
to my missing the siege and the Commune as 
things seen — a great loss. But one day, long after 
my return, while toying with a French paper in a 
cafe in Soho, I read her name. She was bracketed 
with the most notorious of the petroleuses who 
helped to set the city on fire when the insurgents 
reached their last ditch in the graveyard of Mont- 
martre. Most of them were caught black-handed 
and fell under the rifles or the bayonets of the 
soldiery without distinction of sex. In regard to 
this one, the paper could only express a pious hope 
that, if still at large, she might soon have her 
appropriate reward. 

I never heard of her again. 

Many as gentle as she went mad under the 
privations of the siege and the excitement of the 
insurrection, and whether dead or alive, when it 
was all over, vanished into an obscurity equal to 
the night of the grave. The latter would have 
made shorter work of it for one so sorely tried. 
She craved for affection as a birthright, and life 
had not been " nice " to her in that respect. I 
never could understand why it was not : she was 
so happily endowed with likeable faults. " Why 
did you make me hate you ? " might have been 
the catchword of her swan's song. 



PARIS AGAIN 91 

Presently I removed to the Latin quarter, for 
a change ; and other episodes of the same interest- 
ing quahty were not wanting. The hotel was a 
hotch-potch of students, and foreigners more or 
less of that standing, from all parts of the world. 
One of these was a young German — in looks a 
sort of St. Michael, blue-eyed, and blond-haired 
as with a nimbus, and disabled by a swelling on 
the knee due, I should say, to his perambulations 
of the city in search of omniscience. Seeing how 
it was with him, a French lad from one of the 
hospitals immediately took him in charge as doctor 
and nurse, and looked after him like a brother, 
pestering his own professors in daily consultations 
till he pulled his patient through. I have often 
wondered whether they afterwards encountered as 
conscripts at Gravelotte or Sedan. It would have 
been only an additional touch of the colour of life. 

But this again was for the future ; and the 
point is that, splendours or miseries, good hap or 
bad, they were all, in some curious way, part of 
the revel. The revel was at its best one beautiful 
day towards the end of June when, as I noticed, 
the Emperor, returning from a drive, sat bunched 
up in his carriage as with sheer worry. The news 
had come that his puppet Maximilian had fallen 
under the rifles of Mexican rebels, with the whole 
military power of France unable to lift a hand to 
save him. It crowned only the edifice of his 
blunders, and it broke his spell. No wonder : 
think of trying to govern a quick-witted people 
as, in mid-nineteenth century, he had tried to 
govern the French. 



92 MY HARVEST 

" I'll go to hell with anybody," roared the 
skipper in the storm, as he kicked the incom- 
petent sl:eersman from the tiller ; " but I don't 
want to go looking foolish." A Napoleon, bearing 
a sceptre tipped with a blacking brush, had that 
air. 



CHAPTER VII 

INTERVIEWING 

MY next foreign mission was Geneva, for the 
Alabama arbitration. I had left The Star. 
Justin McCarthy had resigned the editorship to 
go to the States on a lecturing and writing tour, 
and John Morley had taken his place. He was 
the latest portent in the Radical journalism of 
that day, a thinker, and to some extent a man 
of action, tempered with caution by the considera- 
tion that he might one day have to make good his 
words as a critic in politics by his deeds as a states- 
man. This kept him cool, if also at times somewhat 
cold, on the surface, though there was fire enough 
within. He has excelled in both parts ; and of 
how few can we say the same thing. 

He was not happy at The Star. He had been 
called in too late : the paper was in extremis. It 
had paid the penalty of its fidelity to the North in 
the American Civil War : heart failure induced by 
defective circulation might have been the verdict, 
if the matter had come before a Coroner's court. 
But it had done its work in helping to save England 
from the blunder of an alliance with the slave 
power. 

We seemed perilously near that alliance when 
Palmerston poured his ten thousand men into 

93 



94 MY HARVEST 

Canada to enforce the just demand for the release 
of the Confederate Commissioners, captured on the 
high seas when they were under the protection of 
the British flag. It was a spirited stroke of pohcy, 
but it had some curious results. The five figures 
of our expeditionary force began rapidly to dwindle 
to four as soon as it reached its destination. The 
North wanted recruits ; the British soldier wanted 
better pay ; and knowing that it awaited him 
on the other side of the frontier, he deserted 
wholesale and took service under the Stars and 
Stripes. It is hardly too much to say that one- 
half of the contingent was employed in keeping 
the other under the colours, till it was wisely 
recalled. 

So now I was a journalist at large, and I began 
to write for The New York World under the resident 
London Correspondent of the paper. Geneva was 
my first commission of importance. This was in 
1872, when England was going into arbitration on 
the Alabama claims, on a sort of foregone con- 
clusion that she was to be a loser by the trans- 
action. In the course of the war she had suffered 
the Alabama and the most destructive of her con- 
sorts to be built, or equipped and manned, in 
English ports. The result was a tremendous bill 
for damages, direct or indirect ; and all that the 
international Tribunal had to do was to cut it 
down to a figure that might be acceptable to both 
parties. Sir Roundell Palmer, afterwards Lord 
Selborne, as leading counsel, and Sir Alexander 
Cockburn, as a member of the Court, were the 
chief representatives of England. Mr. Caleb 



INTERVIEWING 95 

Gushing, Mr. Waite and Mr. Evarts were counsel 
for the United States. Palmer kept his temper, 
whatever he may have thought of his mission : 
Cockburn did not profit by the example. I hap- 
pened to travel to Geneva by the train that took 
him to his destination, and he seemed to glare 
discontent as he alighted here and there, to pace 
the platform for a breather. 

Unfortunately he took his temper with him into 
Court ; and Mr. Gushing made no secret of his 
sense of the discourtesy of this proceeding. Follow- 
ing the etiquette of their profession, the American 
lawyers were for harmonious social relations with 
the other side, but they found it impossible, at 
any rate with Gockburn. Invitations to dinner 
were steadily declined, and there was no knowing 
where to have him even for an exchange of views 
on the state of the weather. He was a proud man ; 
it was galling to him to think that such a case 
should have been arbitrated at all. He seemed to 
chafe under it, while his British colleague, like a 
true advocate, took it all as part of the day's work. 
This perhaps was another grievance. They Avere 
certainly an ill-assorted pair : Palmer, smooth as 
Addison (not to say as Sir John Simon), the other 
savage as Swift. 

There were faults on both sides. Gushing was 
rather sweet on himself as the man who seemed 
to " know the language " wherever he went. He 
not only wrote, but argued his case in French, for 
the benefit of three of the arbitrators, who were 
without a word of English, but who had no right 
to expect relief at the expense of other members 



96 MY HARVEST 

of the tribunal. As a bench of judges, to say 
nothing of the advocates, they were strange yoke- 
fellows to be sure — a Swiss, an Italian, and a 
Brazilian with but the Englishman and the Ameri- 
can as perfect masters of our tongue. French, of 
course, was quite in order as the official language, 
but when Gushing proceeded to air his Italian in 
asides for the benefit of Count Sclopis, the pair 
probably had it all to themselves. At any rate 
Cockburn objected, and the other could think of 
nothing better in reply than to offer him any 
language to his liking, " not excepting Chinese." 
Years before, it seems, he had negotiated the first 
American treaty with China. 

But, whatever the provocation, Cockburn went 
simply all to pieces as to dignity and courtesy in 
other stages of the quarrel. He charged the 
American counsel with " strange misrepresenta- 
tions, assertions without a shadow of foundation, 
attempts to practise on the credulity or ignorance 
of the Bench, ignorance of law and history," and 
with other unpleasant things, including " imagina- 
tions that must have been lively, while their con- 
sciences slept." It was so bad that at one point 
Mr. Adams jumped up and threatened to sit there 
no longer to hear his country traduced. For this, 
however, the offender had the grace to apologize. 
But he kept it up to the last, refusing to sign the 
judgment as a whole, and publishing his reasons 
as a sort of minority report. 

Appropriately enough, in regard to the con- 
fusion of tongues, the tribunal sat in the ancient 
Town Hall of Geneva, which, with its winding way 



INTERVIEWING 97 

instead of a staircase, was reminiscent of early 
pictures of the Tower of Babel. There were no 
steps. You mounted by an inclined plane whereon 
a trick cyclist might easily have ridden from 
bottom to top as a demonstration in hill-climbing. 
A door, guarded by ushers and festooned with 
flags, marked the scene of the deliberations. The 
correspondents stood in line in the ante-chamber 
to see the arbitrators pass in, and if possible to 
catch secrets from their glances. Cockburn's 
signals, as we have seen, were misleading as being 
always at storm. 

Caleb Gushing was one of those who fell to my 
lot for subsequent calls. He was always kindly 
and sometimes communicative if you knew how 
to manage him, but woe to those who tried to 
reach him by the machinery of the interview. 
They came out as empty as they went in, and 
what was more aggravating hardly discovered it 
till they were on their way to the telegraph office. 
Then they found that he had simply interviewed 
the interviewer. It was unique as a new process 
in this branch of the art of self-defence, and 
triumphantly successful : there was no getting 
within his guard. It would run somewhat in this 
way : — 

Pumper. Good morning, Mr. Gushing. 

Pumpee. Good morning, good morning. How 
are you getting on ? 

Pumper. Not very well as to news : I suppose 
you have now come to pretty close quarters with 
the Arbit 

Pumpee. Oh that: yes, pretty close. But has 



98 MY HARVEST 

it occurred to you that this is a most interesting 
city? 

Pumper. I daresay ; but as to the Arbit ? 

Pumpee. One of the most interesting cities in 
the world. Why do you know that this lake at 
our feet has been the scene of some of the most 
exciting naval battles in history. 

Pumper. As I was about to say, the Alabama 

Pumpee. Oh centuries before that — canton 
against canton, galleys by the hundred, with men 
chained to the oar. One side out for conquest, and 
the other for independence. Your readers would 
like that. 

Pumper. Just now, I fancy, they would be 
rather more interested in the 

Pumpee. You'll find all about it in a little book 
on the Quay : only two francs seventy-five, and 
crammed with facts. 

Interviewing was ever an abomination to me, 
and I made a firm stand against it as soon as I 
could. The blame for it lies chiefly with the 
editors, who in this connection are as generals 
enjoying the snug repose of guarded tents while 
they decree forlorn hopes for their followers, very 
often but as a line of least resistance in tactical 
invention. Never shall I forget the embarrassments 
of one adventure of this sort, which I undertook 
years after, at the bidding of the egregious Hurlbert. 
He was in London at the moment ; and in a mood 
of lightness of heart he summoned me from afar 
to his temporary chambers in the Albany. I 
went, and was asked to interview Disraeli and 
Gladstone at once on — things in general, for 



INTERVIEWING 99 

there was not a word of intelligent direction as 
to what they were to be interviewed about. Both 
were at their country places, and Disraeli was 
first on the list. Hurlbert was of some consequence 
in the London society of the time, and he gave 
me letters of introduction from himself to these 
eminent persons, written rather in soft soap than in 
ink. There was nothing for it, so I started straight 
for Hughenden, lightly meditating modes of pain- 
less suicide on the journey. 

There was no need of that : it was so soon 
over in another way : " His Lordship is sorry ; 
he is particularly engaged to-day. But, if you 
would like to see the peacocks " 

" Very much, if only they were talking birds. 
Good afternoon ! " 

What a failure as a mission ; but, as putting 
off an hour of humiliation, what a relief ! 

Ha war den next day. 

With what topic should I try to start him ? 
I meditated it for miles and hours to the rhythmic 
beat of the engine. Three possibilities emerged 
in a sort of replica of his own three courses in 
every situation. Though still coquetting with the 
idea of retirement from politics, he was already 
preparing for the spring that was to bring him 
back into power. Thus they stood. 

1. He had lately written, in The North American 
Review, " Kin Beyond Sea " — a sort of counter- 
blast to the new-fangled Imperialism of his 
rival. 

2. He was at daggers drawn with the classes 
as distinct from the masses. 



100 MY HARVEST 

3. He had long since said that Jefferson Davis 
had made a nation, but he had not Hved it down 
in its effect on pubhc opinion in the Northern 
States. 

The last in reserve, if the others failed ; but 
any or all would do, if only I could get my 
chance. 

Hawarden itself seemed a perfect castle of 
indolence in its approaches. At the lower gate, 
by which I entered, there was no porter in charge 
of the unfinished lodge : and I had nearly a mile's 
walk through a leafy avenue without meeting a 
soul. Next a battlement came in view through 
the screen of branches, then a large outbuilding 
inscribed " Mrs. Gladstone's Orphanage," and I 
was in the courtyard. There was still not a sign 
of a human being, not even of an orphan ; but 
presently I caught sight of a thoroughly charac- 
teristic figure for a place of this description, the 
beggar at the gate. I passed the beggar, rang at 
the hall door, but, as no one answered either a 
first or a second summons, I was glad to return 
and take my place by the sturdy fellow's side. 
The servant lad who had come out to relieve his 
wants was made acquainted with mine ; and I 
returned to the main door to have it opened at 
last. 

It was still a silence, if not a solitude, as the man 
took my card and my precious letter of introduction 
without a word. There was, however, no lack of 
good company in many portraits of the Glyn 
family hanging in the spacious hall. Most of them 
evidently belonged to that period of the great civil 



INTERVIEWING 101 

war in which their originals made a mighty stride 
in fortune by purchasing Hawarden, one of the 
sequestered estates of James, seventh Earl of 
Derby, who had just perished by the axe. They 
held it thenceforth, until Mr. Gladstone came to 
share the possession by his marriage with the 
family. One seemed a very long way off indeed 
from the civil, or any other wars, in this peaceful 
vestibule ; and there was nothing to disturb the 
harmony of association in the drawing-room beyond 
richly stored with old china. Old china was one of 
the tastes of which Mr. Gladstone had repented — a 
sort of folly of youth in which he had spent many 
thousand pounds of his once ample fortune. But 
he had repented, like most of us not without some 
snatches of kindly remembrance of the pleasures of 
the old sin. 

The man was quick enough this time. " Mr. Glad- 
stone is exceedingly sorry, but " 

It was a case for desperate measures, and I took 
the first to hand. 

" Give my compliments to Mr. Gladstone and 
say that I am exceedingly sorry too. I have come 
a long way in the hope of seeing him for a few 
moments. It seems rather hard " 

He was soon back again. " Will you please 
walk this way " ; and in another moment I was 
in the drawing-room and face to face with my 
head of the herd. 

One glance at him was enough to forbid all 
thought of the ease of retirement. He came in 
hurriedly, as though fresh from the most pressing 
labours — if one might judge by the purposeful 



102 MY HARVEST 

set of the lines of his face. There was no missing 
this expression. The face was the first thing you 
looked at, and the last. I was going to say the 
only thing, but I belie myself by adding that he 
was dressed from head to foot in light sporting 
tweed. The contrast was striking ; the body 
all country gentleman — down even to the heavy 
shooting boots — the head all statesman thinker, 
and, but for the brightness of the eye, toilworn 
recluse. It was a contrast that ran through every 
detail of his appearance. What were these stories 
of him as a woodman, a feller of oaks on the estate ? 
Surely one oak in a season should suffice to exhaust 
the energies of this spare and narrow, not to say 
wasted frame. Age had assuredly told on him : 
I seemed to be looking on almost a little man. 
The vast head was altogether out of proportion to 
its supports, a phenomenon seemingly akin in 
kind, though not in degree, to that presented by 
the appearance of the poet Swinburne, whose 
trunk seemed but an inadequate mechanical con- 
trivance for carrying his brain about. 

" I am so engaged," he said with a smile that 
was matched in grave sweetness of expression 
by his always incomparable voice, " that I am 
compelled to seem discourteous to all who call 
without an appointment, but I shall be most 
happy to send someone to show you the house 
and grounds." 

More peacocks, I thought. 

" I must be frank enough to admit," I replied, 
" that my sole desire is to see their owner. The 
author of ' Kin Beyond Sea,' I am afraid, must 



INTERVIEWING 103 

thank himself if that wish is shared by ^11 who 
hke to see justice done to the spirit of American 
institutions by an Enghsh pubhc man." 

He led the way through the open window to the 
lawn : I had got him at last. 

" And yet, in a sense, I assure you I made the 
study as much for my own countrymen as for the 
Americans. I have long felt that we in England 
need a warning to set our house in order, and that no 
time can be better than this when we are on the 
brink of fresh imperial responsibilities." 

It was my turn now, but I was too nervous to 
do much better than talk like a book. 

" You have done but strict justice to America 
in praising her for bearing some of the heaviest 
burdens of war in time of peace for the sake of 
clearing off the national debt. And may I say, 
without presumption, that another good example 
might have been found in the steady resistance 
of the Union to mere annexations for the increase 
of territory." 

" No doubt, but in this case self-control is to 
some extent imposed upon the American people by 
circumstances, or is, at least, obviously suggested 
by them. They know the value of the blessing 
they have in their vast continuous territory. It 
can hardly be exaggerated. I have dwelt on that, 
you may observe, very earnestly in the article 
which you kindly say has so interested you, and I 
hope I have succeeded in making it a capital 
point," 

" Different circumstances," I said, " should have 
imposed the same caution on Englishmen. As it is, 



104 MY HARVEST 

the very people are shouting over our deal for 
Cyprus." 

He shrugged his shoulders. " I had already 
expressed my opinion on that subject pretty 
plainly in Parliament, and I could not have returned 
to it without passing the limits assigned to the 
article. One great object with me in writing was 
to warn certain classes in England — and these by 
no means the humblest in any sense — of the danger 
of certain new lines of policy." 

" The ' leisured classes ' I think you call them ? " 

" If you like ; and you will notice perhaps how 
the well-meant warning has been received by the 
organs of these classes in the English Press. Is it 
possible to exceed the abuse and execration poured 
upon me ? It almost passes my comprehension. 
I have never spoken nor acted in regard to any 
class, with any other desire than to further its 
truest interests." 

He stopped, woefully short of his allotted span 
of two columns. I had to bring up my reserves. 

" They have not spared you, I observe, Mr. 
Gladstone, on this occasion, even the old and stale 
reproach of having declared yourself a well-wisher 
of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy." 

" And I have not answered that charge, because 
I have already met it once, and, as I think, fully 
and satisfactorily, in a letter written for publication 
on the other side of the Atlantic. What is the truth 
about it ? In my first utterance on the subject I 
merely stated what, to my mind, appeared to be 
a fact. I did not express a feeling. As I then read 
the American Constitution it gave the States a right 



INTERVIEWING 105 

to secede ; and that in so reading it I was not alone 
among impartial observers, it is scarcely necessary 
for me to say. But this, of course, would not 
content some persons who were determined to 
misunderstand me, and I was said to have wished 
success to the Confederate cause, though I had never 
concealed my conviction that the act of secession 
was in every respect a mistake. But, I repeat, 
all this was explained in the letter I have alluded 
to, and, but for your reference to it, I should 
certainly not have thought it necessary to return 
to the subject. I am, indeed, still of my original 
opinion, but what I have now said is in no sense 
a supplementary explanation for the public in 
general, since, in my judgment, none is needed. 
At least (firmly) I have none to offer." 

Still short of full measure : I had to hark back 
to the Review. 

" You will very probably be accused of having 
urged America to try the experiment of constitu- 
tional monarchy. I was struck by a passage in 
your article which might easily bear a construction 
of that sort." 

" Only, as in the other case, by confounding a 
statement, or what in this case is hardly even a 
statement, with the expression of a wish. Read 
the passage again." 

" It has occurred to me," I said, " as I daresay 
it has to others, that your temperate panegyric on 
the British Constitution involves a severe censure 
on the manner in which the Constitution is now 
being worked." 

He walked, but he no longer talked. 



106 MY HARVEST 

" The Sovereign," I continued, " is but one 
great power in the State, acting in harmony with 
the rest, yet how much has lately been done to 
reduce Parliament to the position of a mere recorder 
of decrees." 

Still walking. 

" It is impossible, too, to forget that the man 
who has revived this view of the Constitution of our 
day, has also secured a great accession of strength 
for his own office. The Premier may soon be a sort 
of grand vizier over his colleagues, and the virtual 
ruler of the nation." 

More exercise. 

" There was one very striking passage in ' Kin 
Beyond Sea ' — the implied charge against demo- 
cracies of ingratitude to their champions and 
deliverers. 

I said this, as having in my mind, his ; "It 
seems very possible that after a few years we may 
see most of the labourers, both in the Southern 
States and in England, actively addicted to the 
political support of their countrymen who, to the 
last, have resisted their emancipation." Plainly 
enough written with a bitter remembrance of his 
own fall from power. 

He broke silence at last, but it was only a 
valedictory : 

" Would you like to see the old castle ? this part 
is the new house." 

" Thank you : I am afraid I have already taken 
up too much of your time." 

But his scalp was in my belt ; and a pretty 
poor sort of savage I felt for my pains. 



INTERVIEWING 107 

To have talked with him was upHfting, in the 
sense that one had touched history. He was an 
event — prophet and pragmatist in one, a man of 
deep conviction, j^et still able to take what I believe 
to be the right view of politics, as a business 
transaction in spiritual affairs. His modesty was 
deep and sincere ; at the same time, it was definable 
as an art of inducing people to forgive success. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 

SPAIN followed Geneva as a mission, in 1873, 
this time for the New York Tribune. Amadeus 
of Italy, chosen to fill the Spanish throne after 
the expulsion of Isabella, had left it vacant again 
by his sudden resignation at the beginning of the 
year. He was an honest man, Prim's choice in 
the emergency, and Prim's mind was of those 
that yield their best in a quick brew. But Amadeus 
had been boycotted by court and people as a 
foreigner, and being quite their match in pride, 
he packed his trunks and went home again. His 
grandees never attended his receptions, and gener- 
ally speaking left him in a void. He wrote a 
parting address of great dignity and was escorted 
to the frontier with every mark of respect. If 
kings showed a little more of that spirit, it would 
be better for them : it is their insistence on being 
the only servants, public or private, who decline 
to 'take warning' that so often brings them to 
mischance. 

The Republicans with Castelar and Figueras at 
their head, the latter much against his will, got 
the Republic proclaimed, and the Carlists had 
already started the inevitable insurrection. 

I went straight through to Madrid to take stock 
of the situation. There was but one sign of trouble 

108 



SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 109 

on the way. The train came to a sudden halt — no 
difficulty with Spanish trains — and word ran from 
carriage to carriage of a bomb found on the line. 
It served to beguile the tedium of a long journey, 
more especially as we made Madrid without farther 
incident. 

There, it was all new to me in being at least as 
old as Borrow and Ford, to go no farther. I put 
up in the Puerta del Sol, and the morning after 
my arrival I heard guitars in the street below, and 
looking out saw the University students in full 
fig for a masquerade — black silk from top to toe, 
knee-breeches, and the spoon in their cocked-hats. 
This brought us at least to Cervantes, and was 
very good going backwards for a first day. They 
were out in the old fashion for dramatized carica- 
ture, this time at the expense of some unpopular 
person represented by a sort of guy in a coffin. 
My letters, as one may imagine, began to write 
themselves. 

There were other correspondents at the hotel, 
among them Coutouly of The Temps who after- 
wards, in quite a normal way with journalists in 
France, became French ambassador to one of the 
European courts. He knew his Spain well, and 
helped me greatly in the handling of the ropes. 
He at once took me to see Castelar, now lodged in 
the palace just left by the late king. My most 
vivid recollection of the visit is that Amadeus 
smoked excellent cigars. The French of the new 
tenant was of a sort that you could cut with a 
knife. He talked gloriously in the fine florid 
manner of his speeches and of his University 



110 MY HARVEST 

lectures, unconditioned by any troublesome intru- 
sion of mere practical ways and means for the 
government of men. We were going to have a 
great time of it in the regeneration of Spain : wait 
and see. 

While waiting I presented my letters of introduc- 
tion, and in particular made the acquaintance of an 
American family long domiciled in Madrid. They 
took me to the opera in the family coach, and, 
to my inexpressible joy, thought it necessary to 
have a stout fellow on the box by the coachman, 
with pistols in his belt, and, if I remember 
rightly, another man-at-arms in the boot. Nothing 
happened but at least it was Old Spain once more. 
It was like that in everything. At the local bank 
you were reconnoitred through a hole in the door, 
and locked in again on crossing the threshold. 

And so to the Chamber for a lively debate, with 
the Press correspondents taking free inter jectional 
part in it from the gallery in which we all sat. One 
ceased, for the moment, to feel like a foreigner, 
for the accents and the gestures interpreted at 
least half of it without the help of words. The 
same sort of assistance stood me in good stead in 
subsequent visits to the play-houses, whenever 
there was a lull in the political storm. All I wanted 
was the general scheme of the piece ; the sonorous 
declamation did the rest. Here again manners and 
customs were as old as Gil Bias. 

But this naturally was too good to last. It was 
still the dream only ; while the business was about 
as bad as bad could be. Poor Spain had to make 
her reckoning with the time spirit ; and, at her 



SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 111 

age, she was not to be rejuvenated at a bound. 
The Cortes had no sooner voted the Republic, than 
the trouble began. What sort of Republic should 
it be ? asked the Federals and Communists — the 
latter being, in essentials, the old Commune of 
Paris, spoiling for another fight. This cry set the 
south in a flame of revolt, for a republic of state 
rights. No, said the Government at Madrid, it 
should be Liberal but fairly centralized, with all 
the nice things in it — separation of church and 
state, free religious worship, abolition of the no- 
bility, equal electoral districts as to the count of 
" souls," and the army reorganized but still only 
on the old basis of conscription. Great cities 
declared their independence, while the armies went 
forth to put them down, with all the cumbrous 
machinery of the pitched battle and the siege. 

The eastern provinces were for a turn at Anarchy 
on their own account, and one fine day the sailors 
of Cartagena began to sneak off with the fleet. 
Two ships began their travels in this way, until 
they were captured by the German vessels on the 
station, and handed over to the British Admiral 
for safe keeping. They still showed fight, till he 
trained his guns on them ready to fire. They were 
then stored at Gibraltar, and in due course, restored, 
with compliments, to the de facto government. 
Here now were pretty quarrels among republicans, 
to say nothing of the Basques in the north-west, 
out for Church and King — of the Legitimist 
variety — with battles and massacres galore. The 
Don Carlos of the moment had long passed out 
of the condition of personality to become the 



112 MY HARVEST 

label of a system in which it was merged. He had 
come out in the time of Amadeus, in sacred pro- 
test against the House of Savoy which had made 
the Pope the prisoner of the Vatican. His oppor- 
tunity found him in pleasant quarters in the 
Riviera or elsewhere, and he drew the necessary 
cheques for his agents in the provinces on his 
inexhaustible civil list of revolt. When all was 
ready, he set forth in great state to take the field, 
with court and staff and all the rest of it in his 
train. The local priests brought in their levies, 
not a few of them armed with the blunderbuss 
warranted at a single discharge to cover a whole 
barn door with wounds. At first it seemed a sort 
of devils' dance of the brute forces of the prime, 
with an insane cure of Santa Cruz levying black- 
mail by shooting men, tarring, feathering or flogging 
women, and making it hard for the most hardened 
of optimists to echo the cry " God's in His heaven — 
all's right with the world ! " 

South and east were eventually reduced, and a 
Federal Republic of sorts was constituted in due form, 
but the Carlists still kept the butchery going, till 
the land seemed to sweat blood. After six months 
of it poor Castelar, much to his astonishment no 
doubt, found himself President of the Cortes and 
virtual dictator, with all the welter still on his hands. 
Four months more and he was voted into nothing- 
ness, to bring the first year to a close. Then, with 
the opening of 1874, the discontented soldiery, 
blindly obeying their chiefs, took the whole matter 
in hand, forcibly turned the Cortes out of doors, 
and put Serrano into power as a kind of first step 



SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 113 

of a return to the old Liberal monarchy, or as you 
were. As a man of business and of few words, 
he at once declared all Spain in a state of siege. 
By December, Alfonso, son of the exiled Isabella, 
was ready with his manifesto as " Spaniard, 
Catholic and Liberal," and on the very last day 
of the year he was proclaimed king. 1875 was all 
savage fighting with the Carlists. The spring of 
1876 saw Don Carlos a fugitive at Bayonne, and 
Alfonso making his triumphant entry into Madrid 
for the beginning of a peaceful and fairly successful 
reign that lasted till his death. The attempt to 
make a Republic with ultra-Republicans had failed : 
in their hurry for the millennium they fell over 
their own feet. Spain had boxed the compass and 
was a monarchy once more. 

The innermost meaning of it all is that the old 
Spain of the common people wants to be a new 
Spain, just as the old Russia, Turkey, China, 
Persia of the same classes want to make the same 
change. All the picturesque races are longing to 
get rid of their fleas, or, in other terms, to improve 
themselves out of the sordid conditions that make 
them so interesting to the onlooker with the sketch 
book. The Spanish people hated conscription for 
the army, yet in the lack of statesmanship among 
the governing classes, it was impossible to govern 
in any other way. Castelar had to yield on this 
point, and when he yielded he was done for in the 
eyes of the masses, especially of those who had 
been made soldiers against their will. All were 
penniless and miserable under the absentee land- 
lords in the country, and the carpet-bagger lawyers 



114 MY HARVEST 

in the towns. As many as could emigrated to the 
Americas, or went into brigandage at home for a 
living. 

The loss of the victimized colonies has enormously- 
improved the prospect. Spain is learning to depend 
on herself : " here or nowhere is America " will 
be the motto now. With more businesslike con- 
ditions of government, the people, especially the 
peasantry, are less wretched, and that is at least 
a first step on the road to better things. 

When the Irreconcilables, otherwise the double- 
dyed Reds, broke out against the republic at 
Barcelona, Figueras made a special journey to 
quiet them down, with one of the deepest-dyed of 
their number, Roque Barcia, for his bear-leader. 
The United States sent a warship, by way of moral 
support, and he came on board. I saw him there, 
a tired old man distributing tired handshakes, and 
still more tired smiles, till it was time to get back 
again, and shoulder the orb of his fate. 

Having given the Revolution its send-off for 
my readers, I had to get home, this time by way 
of Perpignan. There was no through communica- 
tion with France by railway, on that side, and 
we had to cross the Pyrenees in a diligence. For 
the tourist, it was the perfection of the picturesque, 
ancient walled towns asleep behind their battle- 
ments, with their gates closed against all comers, 
and, at the end of the journey, the floor of a rail- 
way station for a bed, for want of an hotel equal 
to the strain. 

All these difficulties were complicated by per- 
sonal ambitions and personal jealousies to an 



SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 115 

almost inconceivable extent. Not the least of such 
trials was the Queen-Mother Isabella in her new 
part of mother-in-law. There was much excuse 
for her. On the principle of visiting the sins of 
the fathers upon the children, she could not for- 
give her son's first wife Mercedes the crime of her 
origin as a Montpensier. Isabella had a horrible 
upbringing in her mother's court, and when she 
was marriageable Louis Philippe and his minister, 
M. Guizot, who posed as a model of all the virtues, 
contrived to have her united to a man whose 
infirmities seemed to preclude all possibility of his 
having an heir. And on the very day of the cere- 
mony, by a gross breach of faith, the precious 
pair found a husband for her younger sister, next 
in the succession, in the Duke of Montpensier, a 
son of the French king. They had therefore only 
to wait for the death of the childless queen to have 
every hope of seeing the younger sister or one of 
her children on the throne, and French influence 
predominant in Madrid. It very nearly led to war 
between England and France, and Palmerston, this 
time speaking for Queen Victoria as well as him- 
self, rapped out against it with his accustomed 
energy. But one thing brought it all to nothing: 
Isabella did not prove childless, and the arch 
intriguers were compelled to keep their thoughts 
to themselves, if only because, in France, marriage 
precludes all legal inquiry as to paternity. 

Years after I was received by her in special 
audience at her Parisian Palais de Castille, in the 
Avenue du Roi de Rome. She struck me as one 
whose misfortunes were due far less to heredity 



116 MY HARVEST 

than to environment. She was of extreme sim- 
pHcity of manners, and I should certainly think of a 
good heart. With decent parentage and guardian- 
ship she would probably have done exceedingly 
well in any station — the humbler perhaps the 
better, but that is true of most of us. She was 
bonne femme, with sparkling eyes, a ready laugh, a 
personality that seemed all good nature and the 
desire to please and to be pleased. Her talk — 
chatter, I had almost called it — abounded in the 
indiscretions which are a main note of the character. 
She was busy matchmaking, as she might have 
been busy with crochet work, and she made no 
secret of her wish to see her son Alfonso united 
to an English princess — he had become a widower 
within a few months of his first marriage. Her 
almost factious opposition to this union was the 
cause of her having to leave Spain a second time. 
She had barely been allowed to return on a promise 
of abstention from all public affairs, when she 
could find nothing better to do than denounce 
the match, and she had to forfeit her pension, 
and " quit." 

She was quite equal to the occasion, and osten- 
tatiously sold her jewels, by way of putting her 
disobedient son to shame. There never was such 
a sale : it took some weeks, spread — with the 
intervals to enable the public to recover its breath 
— over a period of four months. All this time 
the auctioneers were tap-tap-tapping to disperse 
these hoards of a lifetime, or perhaps of a whole 
dynasty. One could but think of the almost 
irresponsible owners of such wealth at one end of 



SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 117 

the scale of living, and of the chestnut, or, for that 
matter, acorn-fed wild men of the cork woods, 
at the other. There were over three hundred lots, 
and this did not extend to the odds and ends of 
cameos, smaller jewels, medallions and a sort of 
sweepings of unmounted pearls. The greater lots 
were in the form of parures, that is to say full 
sets in one pattern of diadem, bracelets, ear-rings, 
girdle and all the needful odds and ends. One 
network of emeralds set in brilliants, called a 
collar, might better have deserved the name of a 
breastplate as its lowest gem would have touched 
the waist. It was in truth quite a piece of architec- 
ture, and it might have served in Liliput as a 
fa9ade. Like many of the other lots, it had to be 
divided owing to the impossibility of finding a 
buyer for it as it stood. Such too was the fate of 
a butterfly, the sport of sunny hours, but decidedly 
one of tropical breed, for it was nearly as big as 
your hand. It was too gross for even a queen of 
Brobdingnag, and would have vulgarized any 
woman who wore it, no matter what her natural 
distinction. One shuddered to think of its damag- 
ing effect on Isabella of Spain. All jewels surely 
should be worn in single specimens, not in the bunch 
— the one entire and perfect chrysolite is enough. 
The excess is the fault of the jewellers who think 
that twice one always makes two, when in such 
matters it often brings you back to zero. The 
whole thing was brutal in the French sense. 

Like many another bonne femme, the queen had 
quite a child mind. The person highest in her 
confidence in her retirement of the Palais de 



118 MY HARVEST 

Castille was her pet dwarf. He had a ready wit 
and an intelHgent face. His turn-out was, if not 
one of the most splendid, at least one of the 
neatest in Paris. He drove a pony, not much 
larger than a Newfoundland dog, in a trap that 
reminded you of the vehicles to which the goats are 
harnessed in the Champs Elysees. Everything was 
in keeping about him, with the exception of his 
cigar, and that being of the ordinary size was big 
enough to serve him as a walking-stick. He had 
an establishment ; and his servants (who, it must 
be confessed, were as much out of keeping as the 
weed, in being of the common stature) seemed to 
treat him with the most profound respect. 

Before her downfall Isabella always kept a dwarf, 
perhaps to show her regard for the ways of her pre- 
decessors on the throne. To judge by what one 
sees in the picture gallery at Madrid, the Spanish 
court would have been only more thoroughly 
incomplete without a monarch than without a 
freak. There is the king, and there is the pigmy 
— ^the latter often in the same picture and always 
close at hand. Sometimes he shows a sad face, 
as of one ever murmuring at fortune for having 
made him greater than other men, because nature 
had made him immeasurably less ; sometimes he 
seems pleasantly puffed up with a sense of self- 
importance, as though he understood the royal 
" we " to include himself and his master. Many 
a minister of state is missing from the gallery, but 
there seems to be no break in the succession of 
dwarfs. When these pictures were painted nearly 
every court in Europe had a curiosity of this 



SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 119 

description, and the little men were so highly 
prized that they were among the few objects of 
interest which princes could present to one another. 
But the demand for them gradually ceased as 
common sense spread upwards from the people to 
their rulers ; the French Revolution brought it 
almost to a standstill, and the diminutive courtiers 
went into limbo with the last remnants of feudalism. 
One court, however, continued to give them an 
asylum, and the small gentleman in question shared 
the confidence of Isabella with Mafori and the 
Bleeding Nun, and accompanied her in her hasty 
flight from the capital. 

He left one palace only to find shelter in another. 
The Queen had laid by for a rainy day, and her 
Parisian exile was only less splendid than her 
state in Madrid. He had a suite of apartments in 
the regal mansion of the Avenue du Roi de Rome, 
and at a fixed hour every morning he was admitted 
to the room of his benefactress with the lapdog 
and the parrot, both brought, like himself with no 
little difficulty, across the frontier in those trying 
moments when the Queen had to surrender every- 
thing but what was absolutely indispensable to her 
comfort. He was of use to Her Majesty in a 
thousand ways, his wit entertained her, and her 
favourite morning's amusement was to see him 
make sport of the old ministers who had contri- 
buted to her downfall, or of the new ones who 
were serving the Provisional Government. His 
speeches a la Castelar were highly relished ; and 
he somehow used to contrive to look tall for the 
purpose of caricaturing the gait and bearing of 



120 MY HARVEST 

Figueras. When the latter undertook his des- 
perate journey to Barcelona, the dwarf made a 
great hit by appearing before his mistress one day 
all in red and carrying a puppet (made up in rude 
imitation of the Republican minister), of which 
he pulled the strings to symbolize the relations 
between Figueras and his unwelcome associate, 
Roque Barcia. The representation was much 
applauded. Poor Amadeus, who had previously 
left the country, was, of course, not spared ; and 
the dwarf was peculiarly happy in satirical touches 
on the solitude in which that king lived, through 
the refusal of the native nobility to attend his 
court. 

But he was a good deal more than a buffoon — 
he was a trusted counsellor ; and he was really 
one of the few wire-pullers who shuffled puppet 
after puppet off the scene at Madrid until the 
stage was left clear for the entry of Alfonso. He 
had a sound head and exceptional opportunities 
of using it to advantage in confidential missions. 
In this capacity he was invaluable, for he was 
about the only person, known to have been formerly 
about the person of Isabella, who was allowed to 
enter Spain. No one thought of suspecting him — 
it was only the dwarf, and besides, he had a capital 
excuse for his presence* in the country : he had 
come to look after his " property," a patch of 
ground in the neighbourhood of Aranjuez bestowed 
on him one day in a frolic of good nature by the 
Queen. He talked much of his estate and of the 
neglected condition in which it had been left by 
the fall of the dynasty ; and a pretended anxiety 



SPAIN IN REVOLUTION 121 

to secure it from confiscation gave him an oppor- 
tunity of seeing many of the men in power, and 
of quietly sounding them as to their disposition 
towards the exiled house. But his chief business 
lay among the leaders of the Alfonsist party : and 
he was the most faithful, and the most intelligent 
of go-betweens for them and for the cabal in 
Paris. He was as free from molestation from all 
parties as his colleague the parrot, and he had that 
bird's gift of accurately repeating whatever was 
said in his hearing, joined to an intelligence that 
was all his own. His memory was wonderful : 
he took no notes, carried no papers, but conveyed 
the substance of communications from one side to 
the other without losing a single item of impor- 
tance on the way. When all was ready, and Alfonso 
was about to start from Paris, the little man was in 
high glee with the expectation of being promoted 
to the King's suite. But the young monarch was 
sufficiently well-advised to leave as much as possible 
of his mother's property behind him, in ideas as 
in personal belongings, and the dwarf was given 
to understand that, small as he was there would 
not be room for him in the baggage. 

There was another reason for his exclusion : 
Alfonso simply detested him for the contempt 
which his influence in the Queen's household 
tended to bring upon the royal name. He was 
part of a peculiarly hateful past, and a part out of 
all proportion to his physical size. He was left 
in Paris, as the Queen was left, because both 
would have been highly dangerous companions for 
a momentous journey. Isabella was nothing loath 



122 MY HARVEST 

to have him with her ; she loaded him with 
favours ; and with these and her subsequent gifts 
he became a rich man. Alfonso would perhaps 
have been content to have seen both of them for 
the last time, but he found it impossible in the 
long run to resist his mother's entreaties for per- 
mission to return to Spain. He coupled his assent, 
however, with one almost intolerable condition : 
she was to leave the dwarf behind : and there was 
more negotiation on this article of the family 
pact which preceded the journey than on all the 
rest put together. She cried like an infant when 
she bade her abridgment of a courtier good-bye, 
and she left him for a consolation the well-filled 
purse on which he afterwards led the life of a 
gentleman in the most luxurious capital of Europe. 
A half-witted world ! If the others are no better, 
it makes nightmare of the whole cosmic scheme. 



CHAPTER IX 

PROVINCES AND METROPOLE 

MANCHESTER was the next stage. I had 
undertaken responsibih'ties and I wanted a 
regular engagement. I found it with The Man- 
chester Guardian, then as now among the best, 
local only in its place of origin, metropolitan and 
more in its vision, and in its championship of all the 
great causes, win or lose. 

S'il gagne bataille 
Aura mes amours. 
QuHl gagne, ou quHl yerd 
Les aura toujours. 

Perhaps the nymph was a prophetess, with 
such a paper in her mind. 

For me it was a great change, from the capital 
to a great provincial city. It was so different, 
sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, 
yet always as a question of limitations. I do not 
mean in regard to size : Manchester and Salford 
between them are big enough for anything, but 
they are still only varieties of the same thing. 
London is every city, and it mirrors the empire 
and the world. 

It was not always so. The chief provincial 
cities had to suffice to themselves in politics, 

123 



124 MY HARVEST 

literature, science and art — to take the formula of 
the old-fashioned weekly papers. " Who made the 
assembly shine ? — Robin Adair ! " There was an 
assembly, a social centre. The railways have put an 
end to all that. Now, if you want a ball or even 
a party on the big scale, you must come to town 
for it : it costs less in time and trouble, and even 
in cash. The distant garrisons run up to London 
for their regimental dinners. The provinces of 
the theatrical world once had companies of their 
own, schools of acting, local stars. The judg- 
ment of Manchester has long carried weight in 
general criticism. Its approval was the starting- 
point of the brilliant theatrical career of Genevieve 
Ward. So in art : you had a Manchester school, 
as you had a Norwich school. The Manchester 
painters still called themselves a school in my 
day, but the migration had begun. Glasgow still 
struggles hard, but its crack hands await the 
verdict on the banks of the Thames. Man- 
chester with its Brierlys and its Waughs, 
had its own brand of literature as the Lakes had 
theirs. They were the writers for the people and 
about the people : now with the sevenpenny 
editions, to go no farther, every mill-hand may 
seek his ministrants in the entire mind of the race. 
It had above all its school in politics with Bright 
and Cobden as men of the time. 

So it has come to this, if you blow a penny 
whistle at the Hebrides, to ends of fame or fortune, 
you must try your luck with it in London town. 
The essentially Scottish comedian of the music- 
halls made his name in London, though now, 



PROVINCES AND METROPOLE 125 

surpassing even the Christy Minstrels, he never 
performs out of the planet. The gentry shopped 
in Manchester, to the glory and profit of ancient 
firms counting their life by centuries : we know 
where they shop to-day. Manchester struggled 
hard for its all-sufficing school of music, with 
Halle in the conductor's chair, but it now owns 
the force of gravitation as exercised at Covent 
Garden and Queen's Hall. Cobbett was at least 
prophetic in calling London the Wen : it appro- 
priates all the nutriment of the country to its own 
uses, diseased ones if you like ; but protest is beside 
the mark. 

The local universities are playing their part 
in a healthier reaction. Owens College was but 
our academic influence when I first knew the 
Guardian : it might now staff the whole paper 
in the higher branches. The editor, then as now, 
was Charles Prestwich Scott. He had passed 
through Oxford, and gradually brought in some of 
the Oxford men. Before his day the chief leader 
writer was Acton, of the University of London. In 
this respect, however, as just shown, Manchester 
might easily be sufficient to itself. The same thing 
might be said, in the same connexion, of the sister 
universities of Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow and 
other great cities all over the kingdom. They 
will in time develop a perfect character of their 
own, perhaps as they learn to specialize less in 
universality. 

Birmingham has made a bold bid for freedom, 
but it is still a satellite. Since Mr. Chamberlain 
could not avert that, it is not to be averted, yet 



126 MY HARVEST 

his very success would have intensified the 
provincial note : London is not the bright par- 
ticular star, but the firmament. Chamberlain was 
such a star from first to last : as he waxed or 
waned in splendour, so did Birmingham with him, 
in rare subservience to his moods. I remember his 
mayoralty in his salad days, and the visit of the 
Prince and Princess of Wales, yet to be Edward 
VII and his Queen. Would he be decently civil to 
them ? — it was a toss up. He stood for the Radical 
Programme, for ransom as applied to the classes 
in possession, and for many fine things, that yet 
await the moon's next visit to the earth. We all 
trembled, even his own clients. Principles are 
very well, but when you have a guest under your 
roof, to say nothing of Royalty, you are under the 
same obligations as the Arab in his tent. Well, 
they came, and all the white country of the cotton 
spinners, with half the black came to see. The 
whole kingdom heaved a sigh of relief when it 
heard that he had been "nice" from first to last. 
His manners were perfect ; his decoration of the 
town was a model ; his orchid put all the stars and 
crosses to shame. He knew what he was about : 
it was his first step into notice as a governing 
man. 

What Scotland gained by the Union, Edinburgh 
lost. Think of the days when it was a true capital, 
with its own Parliament and Parliament men, 
its own society, and later on its own literary set 
ruling all Britain from the office of The Edinburgh 
Review, its very Nodes a main source of light for 
the isle. Its Athenian prototype was of course 



PROVINCES AND METROPOLE 127 

the supreme case in point. It is the multiphcity 
of interest that counts ; not any one thing by 
itself, but the all-roundness of them all put together, 
for the benefit of the all-round man. 

There is more of this in the American cities. 
Each is a centre more or less self-sufficing, and all 
the sentiment it has to spare goes rather to its 
sovereign state, than to the larger Union beyond 
— except of course when the foreigner begins to 
make remarks. 

Wait till Edinburgh and Dublin recover a 
larger share of political autonomy, and we shall 
still see great things. If not, we may, as an 
exercise in pure imagination, amuse ourselves 
with a vision of the provinces marching on 
London to the cry of ' ancient lights ' and re- 
leasing her only upon terms of absolute social 
independence. 

It is difficult to say what one means about the 
unique character of London without having to 
say more than one means. First, it is no case of 
superiority, only one of essential difference. The 
other great cities serve abundantly to all the 
reasonable wants of man. Perhaps this is just where 
the point comes : the unreasonable wants are 
usually the most urgent. London affords such 
ample subsistence in fancy and whim, the elements 
that make for the sense of freedom and fullness of 
being. All the types of humanity are in her streets 
and her public places, all their records in her 
museums, their dreams in her picture galleries, their 
follies in her shows, their race types in her monster 
hotels with her docks to follow. Her clubs are not 



128 MY HARVEST 

two or three, one for the county, one for the middle 
class, a third for the others : they sample the orb. 
St. James's Street and Pall Mall are only for one 
section, the ruling class in arts and arms. If 
you want more or less, give it a name and it can 
still be found within the radius, down to the cock 
and hen clubs of the eastern slums. 

Then, for all the faiths, consider only the range 
of her conventicles from the Abbey and St. Paul's 
to the corrugated roofs and spires of the Salvation 
Army, done at a price. All the insurrections of 
belief are housed elsewhere, if not, they still 
make shift with the street corners and the parks. 
Bagdad of the caliphs is child's play to it for the 
variety of life. For vice in its frolic hour, and in 
its attribution to the wicked foreigner, Soho may 
serve, and for a deeper shade you have but to 
cross the street to the hinterland of Tottenham 
Court Road. A modern Balzac might die of the 
impossibility of writing a line, for excess of 
material. His Comedie Humaine would be but 
a curtain-raiser now. Quicquid agunt homines — 
what a proud boast, and what a laughable one 
when one thinks how much Mr. Bickerstaff and 
his merry men had perforce to miss. The smaller 
cities miss most of it, through being so effectually 
policed. You cannot police London, and the 
constable shows his sense of it by toying with 
nuts on his beat. Every day some fifty thousand 
pleasure seekers of every tribe of civilization are 
dumped into it, simply to see the sights. It would 
be distracting enough to send them all to the 
lunatic asylums by nightfall, if they had time to 



PROVINCES AND METROPOLE 129 

give it a thought. Therein lies its magic : the 
call of London is the call of a syren of a thousand 
wiles. 

In France local independence counts for more, 
as a compensation for excess of administrative 
control. The chief place of the department has 
usually its cathedral, always its public library, 
museum, art gallery. The prefect is there, a 
great civil officer, with his staff. The garrison 
is generally hard by, and this brings in the military, 
if only as partners at the dances. The University 
is there ; even its professors have their social 
uses. The Cathedral chapter is not to be forgotten. 
The magnates of commerce and industry rank 
as powers with the rest. In such societies a 
writer like Anatole France has his opportunity. 
They are organic, whatever else they are not : 
this marks the main difference between French 
and English cities of the same standing. If there 
had been such a true social unit in Manchester 
when they were building the town hall, that 
magnificent structure would have had a suitable 
site. As it is, it lies hid in its back square hardly 
with breathing room for its inmates, certainly 
with no room for their elbows. That crime was 
the work of a knot of intriguers, some with proper- 
ties to sell, others out for a victory against common 
sense, for the fun of the thing, perhaps the most 
corrupt of all motives in public affairs. There 
was the site waiting in the great square, then 
dowered with a hideous infirmary that might easily, 
and in every way beneficially, have been removed 
to the fine open country outside. In France 



130 MY HARVEST 

organized public opinion would have put the 
factions to shame. It is hard to create master- 
pieces of architecture at a pinch, but for how many 
years after Manchester's elevation to a bishopric 
was its cathedral still but a transmogrified parish 
church. Liverpool is doing better in cathedrals, has 
always done better — compare the two town halls for 
elevations and for pride of place — because Liver- 
pool as an organism, has more of the all sorts that 
go to make a world. For still one more example, 
look at the fine Rylands library of Manchester, 
and then consider its site. 

But what the large cities lose in variety of 
interest they gain in concentration of character. 
Manchester was a pleasant place to live in, as soon 
as you left the streets for the houses. If you 
had fewer acquaintances, you had more friends. 
The walls glowed with pictures, all well-meaning 
if not all good, and charming as a scheme of 
decoration. It was the period of the lavish 
outlay on art, as a fancy and as an invest- 
ment combined. The nation was in the full tide 
of prosperity : there was money waiting for 
profitable use, and it went experimentally into 
masterpieces of the modern school. Some demon 
that many mistook for an angel of light whispered 
to Manchester " have a taste." It was decided 
that the taste should be pictures. Here again 
London had led the way with art as a fashion, 
and Picture Sunday as the day of days for the 
year. There was no dropping in about it : the 
invitations were issued weeks in advance, and 
where they were not offered, they were sought. The 



PROVINCES AND METROPOLE 131 

old masters still held their ground for lip service, 
but they were not plentiful enough to meet the 
demand. 

The Manchester man who had just done well 
on 'Change took his favourite picture dealer's on 
the way home to repeat the stroke. His business, 
in the one place, was to know all about coming 
cargoes, and, in the other, about coming men. 
The dealer was there to advise, with the full 
assurance of a fortune for his share of the transac- 
tion, and of good pickings for his workman with 
the brush. You bought at a stiff price to stimulate 
the sense of luck in the purchase, and four figures 
were the almost invariable rule. The idea was 
that you had better make haste about it, or they 
would soon be five. In that expectation many 
invested in pictures as they might have invested 
in diamonds, confident of the rise, and put them 
on the same footing as money, land, or houses in 
their wills. 

This went on until heirs began to realize, with 
sore disappointment in lieu of the expected portion. 
The new master instead of proving a second 
Gainsborough or Constable became a mere Dick 
Tinto who had been found out. The full exposure, 
of course, did not come all at once. It was a 
matter of time, but its progress was steady, and 
when it was complete artists went into the simple 
life of bankruptcy as fast as the victims of a 
South Sea bubble. Some died of the change ; others, 
perhaps less fortunate, lived on only to see their 
pictures laughed out of the auction rooms, at 
prices that would hardly pay for the frames. It 



132 MY HARVEST 

was all too foolish and so unnecessary. The 
John Edward Tajdor sale showed what a good 
investment good art might be, when the investor 
was also his own connoissem\ 

Then came the demand, which has lasted to 
our time, for old masters of our own schools who 
had stood the test of experience. New ones, even 
in this line, had to be discovered to meet the rush : 
Raeburn had his turn at last. They, in turn, 
became the objects of an equally fatuous inflation, 
perhaps to end in a second disappointment, for 
you may still pay too dear for your whistle, though 
a whistle of worth. 

Much the same thing has gone on in France. 
Millet, who lived and died in a cottage with ground 
for the floor, realized fabulous prices, not for his 
heirs, worse luck ! but only for the dealers who 
had stocked him in his hour of need. It was 
Millet who said : — " The trees talk to each other. 
I'm sure of it. I can't tell you what they're saying, 
but I know they are not making puns." High- 
water mark was reached here with an Angelus 
changing hands at something like twenty thousand 
sterling, with rival dealers mopping their brows 
as they toiled to that figure by five-hundred- 
pound bids. It was the same, to some extent, with 
father Corot, though he lived to net enough for 
the satisfaction of his heroically simple wants. 
There was, however, less disappointment in the 
long run, because in matters of this sort the French 
are not so easily deceived. Their second and 
their third best men, who had been made to rank 
as first raters, took their proper place, and the 



PROVINCES AND METROPOLE 133 

practice of booming for the rise came sooner to 
its inevitable end. 

The authority of our picture dealer over his 
customer in his hey-day was one of the strangest 
things. It was quite spiritual in its nature. The 
man who could hold his own with the best on 
'Change became as a child when he passed into 
the show-rooms. The very shopman was almost 
his priestly guide. He took charge of him, led 
him round the gallery and told him what he really 
wanted to buy. It was almost hypnotic in its 
power of suggestion. The choice of course was 
always in favour of the stocks on hand. Two or 
three names were in vogue at a time, and the 
client was given to understand by many a hint 
freely garnished with the current cant of criticism 
that he had better secure his bargain at once. 
His social vanity helped to effect his ruin. His 
neighbour and friendly rival in such acquisitions 
had secured a masterpiece of the moment, and 
here was a providential chance of getting some- 
thing by the same sure hand. In this way some 
bought simply for ostentation, and without a 
thought of gain. Collectors must be in the fashion 
like other people, and it is peculiarly hard to have 
to look foolish on your own hearth. The dealers 
themselves no doubt often acted in perfect good faith : 
they might have used Johnson's plea: — ignorance, 
sheer ignorance ! But the faith of their victims 
became a positive superstition. In one case I 
remember a certain picture was the Naboth's 
vineyard to a friend of the owner : he yearned 
for it. " Will you part with it ? " he asked. " Well, 



134 MY HARVEST 

no, but if ever I do you can have it at cost price." 
It was loyally offered in that way some time after, 
but the other now fought shy. It was then rebought 
by a dealer, and soon resold at a handsome profit 
to the very man who had declined it. He mis- 
trusted his own judgment, and he cheerfully paid 
the extra price to have it confirmed by a shop- 
walker. 



CHAPTER X 

REPUBLICAN FRANCE 

MY cockney craving for a capital led me again 
to Paris. I resigned at the Guardian, and 
made the great venture — for the moment on but 
slender encouragement in assured work. 

I took an apartment in the Rue Galilee by the 
Arc de Triomphe, and, armed with a few intro- 
ductions, set out on the pleasant task of spying 
the richness of the land from the point of view of 
a settler. France was rising to her feet again, 
after the war ; and, while retaining their cut and 
fashion, sending all her institutions to the repairing 
shop. It was a great opportunity for the corre- 
spondent who was worth his salt. But I was no 
correspondent as yet, only an outsider, waiting 
for an opening, a very different thing. The men 
on the establishments were few, and they ranked 
as the heads of their branch of the calling. 

Everything was now in a state of change, the 
foreign correspondence with the rest. The men 
in possession were of what I may call the middle 
period. I had profited much before starting by 
the counsels of my old friend, John Eraser Cork- 
ran, who had retired to London after a long resi- 
dence in France. He had represented The Morn- 
ing Herald, in Paris, for years, and was the type 

135 



136 MY HARVEST 

and model of the great correspondents of the old 
school. His wife, a woman of stately beauty and 
wide literary culture, had in her salon, taken charge 
of the social part of his work. They were of the 
first great period — the reign of Louis Philippe, the 
Republic of 1848, the coup d'etat and the Second 
Empire. Victor Hugo had come up in literature 
— he was a peer of France of the Liberal Monarchy 
— Alfred de Vigny was going down, much to his 
disgust, Lamartine had fretted his hour on the 
stage of politics, Balzac was still busy. All were 
of Mrs. Corkran's circle in the French capital not 
as celebrities to be interviewed, but as friends by 
the fireside. Thackeray was their closest intimate, 
the fairy godfather of their children, the man who 
found the knife and fork always ready for the 
happy chance of his company at a meal. He was 
still brooding over big work while taking his luck 
with the trifles that came to hand. One day he 
had this to say to his hosts : "I think I'm safe 
for a good second rate at last." — Vanity Fair was 
in the printer's hands. 

At that time no correspondent used the tele- 
graph wire ; I doubt if there was one to use. They 
wrote long letters hot with the impression of 
things seen and lived, and where there was need 
of haste, they hired post-chaises, and set off for 
Calais on their own account, to catch the mail 
boat. It was a matter of days and nights of cease- 
less travel, of reckless and lavish bargains with 
the post-houses on the road, of neck-and-neck races 
in genial rivalry for the chance of a first bid for 
the last relay left in the stable, each flourishing a 



REPUBLICAN FRANCE 137 

mocking farewell to the other with his packet, as 
he forged ahead. On the road back they shared 
the victor's chaise, with frequent halts for an 
omelette and a bottle in the old inns of old towns 
— the best chums in the world. In this way they 
often beat the official couriers from the embassies, 
and gave Downing Street itself first news, with 
many warm acknowledgments in return. 

Much of this had changed when I went back to 
Paris : the wire had come to town, but only as a 
luxury in scrappy messages. Its use, even in that 
way, carried with it such a sense of daring novelty, 
and of profanely expressed contempt for the 
expenses, that The Daily Telegraph made its first 
coup with its title. The letters were still written, 
but they were sent by post, and over and above 
that they were written at the cafe in lieu of an 
office. The correspondent actually rented a whole 
table to himself at a place within easy reach of the 
central post, and his myrmidons came and went, 
with last items of news to fill the fat envelope to 
the bursting point, up to the last minute of the last 
quarter of an hour. 

The third and final change came with the 
correspondent's office, also at times his place of 
residence, in some spacious suite of rooms, with 
the title of the paper in huge gilt letters on his 
balcony, as a bye-product of advertisement for 
the world at large. The Daily Telegraph set this 
fashion, at a corner of the Boulevard and the Place 
de rOpera. The Standard followed the example at 
the corner opposite. The Daily News was near 
in the rue du Quatre Septemhre. In point of style, 



138 MY HARVEST 

it was a great improvement on the old system of 
a business address no better than ' Cafe de la Pro- 
vidence, first table on the left.' The correspondent 
could now receive in state. He was no longer 
obliged to go to the ministries for his news ; they 
often came to him, and were admitted only on 
formalities as solemn as their own. A man in 
black answered the bell, led the way to the waiting- 
room, and came back to relieve the tension of 
expectancy with a ' not at home ' or ' will you 
walk this way ? ' The very furniture grew im- 
pressive as you neared the shrine : you felt that 
you were in the inner sanctum of a department 
of state. To this period belonged the great 
Blowitz of The Times, Campbell Clarke of The 
Telegraph, and the Crawfords of The Daily News. 

I can only treat the last as a dual personality, 
for Mrs. Crawford was to the full as important, 
to put it mildly, as the man who had given her 
the name by which she was so widely known. 
As a matter of fact, towards the last, she was the 
correspondent and the correspondence. She had 
extraordinary facility with the pen. She wrote 
with malice in the French sense, that is to say 
with humour, dash and point. The sex attributes 
of mind, as commonly generalized, seemed to 
have changed : hers was the will behind the 
instrument, the address, the energy, the power 
to face the world. Under growing infirmities, his 
part declined to the practice of the domestic 
virtues. He was a dignified gentlemanlike person 
who had been a good hand in his day, but that day 
was gone ; and since he could no longer fill the 



REPUBLICAN FRANCE 139 

part of the new man of the period, it was filled 
for him in their common interest by his partner, 
as the new woman. For The Daily News she wrote 
one kind of political letter befitting the gravity of 
the subject, and for Truth quite another, a perfect 
storehouse of the anecdote of the day as it bore 
on the drama of public life. She knew all the 
leading men, especially on the Republican side : 
Gambetta was often to be met at her luncheon 
table. With this, she produced endless articles 
for the reviews British and American, and I think 
had another correspondence for a New York paper. 
It was an all - devouring activity. Some of the 
work had the blemishes of haste, none of it was 
less than workmanlike. There was a powerful 
mind behind it, too often doing less than justice 
to itself, but — one must live ! A chance word of 
hers once put me on the track of an estimate of 
character in a common friend, at which I had been 
tinkering for years. She was handsome, but in a 
mannish way — a big, powerful head, lips apt for a 
smile or a resolve, a solid block of brow, with 
sparkling Irish eyes to light its recesses with 
promise of good fellowship and entertainment. As 
she advanced in age she looked like a marquise of 
the old school, with a mass of silvery white hair — 
warranted natural — for the indispensable effect of 
the peruke. 

In her husband's interest she fought the great 
Blowitz in a struggle for the primacy of the Press 
gallery at the Assembly. In their relations with 
the questor of that body the correspondents were 
represented by Crawford, appointed by the suffrages 



140 MY HARVEST 

of his colleagues. Blowitz sighed for the post, 
and began to make interest with the little con- 
stituency for the next sessional election. Craw- 
ford's prospects looked poor, but when the lady 
entered into the fray, they soon improved. She 
interviewed the authorities, she wrought by turns 
on the hopes and fears of the constituency, she 
stuck at nothing, and she won. The great one 
bated no jot of grandeur in defeat. When he saw 
how things were going, he took care to cast his 
vote on the winning side, with compliments 
addressed to the hearts of his supporters by 
inference at the expense of their heads. Hely 
Bowes of The Standard took another pinch of snuff 
and proposed a dinner of reconciliation ; Campbell 
Clarke assented with the smile that probably clung 
to him even in his dreams. 

France was once more in the fullest activity of 
all her energies. While the statesmen shaped her 
government, brought the army back to life, and 
began to educate her people, others were at work 
on the reconstruction of the salon on a Republican 
basis. They found their leader in another remark- 
able woman, Juliette Lamber, the pen name of 
Madame Adam. 

If Madame Bonaparte-Patterson had lived to 
know Juliette Lamber she would not have despaired 
of republicanism as a means of social success. The 
latter was rich, charming, and she kept open house 
for the republic in her drawing-room in the Boule- 
vard Poissonniere — of all places in the world. 
She might almost be said to have revived the 
salon ; for what with the war and the change of 



REPUBLICAN FRANCE 141 

manners, that essentially French institution had 
long been in a languishing state. She certainly 
revived it in the interest of the new regime and so 
trumped the last card of monarchical reaction. 
The Legitimists said that you could never have a 
salo7i without an aristocracy ; the Orleanists, that 
you could never have it without wealth as well ; 
and of course both implied that you need not look 
for wealth or birth outside their ranks. Madame 
Adam had one at least of these qualifications : her 
second husband, the Senator, was a Republican 
when it was rather a bold thing for a man of means 
to wear the badge of that party. He was at 
Gambetta's side in the darkest hours of the war ; 
and when he died he left his political faith to his 
wife. The other part of the heritage consisted of 
some odd millions of francs. People came to her 
to talk politics, art, literature ; and that of course 
was her salon in the germ. 

She began in a small way, soon after the close of 
the Communist troubles, and little by little her 
house became a sort of antechamber of Parliament. 
There were two conditions of entry ; position, and 
I was going to say, faith in the new constitution, 
but that is hardly exact. If you could not bless 
the existing form of government, you had at least 
to refrain from doing the other thing. As time 
wore on she exercised a large hospitality, and was 
better able to dictate terms. 

But this anticipates : there were moments when 
she kept a social conventicle for republicans almost 
at the risk of her personal safety. A night or so 
after Marshal MacMahon's coup known as The 



142 MY HARVEST 

Sixteenth of May, a few men gathered in her 
rooms with every prospect, as they thought, of 
being hurried off to gaol when they reached the 
street. Louis Blanc, Gambetta, Girardin were of 
the number. It was a moment of the wildest 
rumours : every newcomer had his story of the 
intention of the Broglie Cabinet to make a clean 
sweep of the party. One had heard from a friend 
in the Ministry of the Interior that the list of 
proscription had been drawn up. Another had 
seen the police waiting at the doors of the destined 
victims. All this was a little absurd, perhaps — 
so was the talk of the hunted beasts in the fable 
— but we must remember that many of Madame 
Adam's guests had felt the teeth of the trap in 
the time of Louis Napoleon. Louis Blanc was one 
of the few who declared there was nothing in the 
new scare. He demonstrated logically that there 
could not be another couy d'etat, as circumstances 
had changed. The Man of December succeeded 
because the Assembly was unpopular ; the present 
Assembly being popular, MacMahon would have 
no chance. The logician was right : for once in a 
way, the circumstances had listened to reason. 
When Gambetta left about midnight, the others, 
at the bidding of their hostess, saw him safe home. 
At a dinner given at her house some time after he 
proposed her health in highly eulogistic terms, as 
one who had been the friend of the republic in 
adversity, and who would be its ornament in its 
brighter hour. 

It was a salon of the bourgeoisie of course, but 
that was its strength on one side, if its weakness 



REPUBLICAN FRANCE 143 

elsewhere. The repubhc was no longer to be 
identified with mob rule. People began to go to 
her for what they could get, a sure sign of power : 
her friendship was the short cut to a prefecture, 
for ministers were understood to be at her beck 
and call. Of the many women fit to bear them 
company few were allowed to cross the threshold. 
She managed to do without them for awhile : she 
had some taste in art, and her skill in literature 
was attested by many clever books. Gradually 
her house won the repute of a place where you 
met everybody who was in the movement. I 
recall a few figures — Gambetta — till he gave it 
up on the conviction that one leader of the party 
was enough, and that if the lady continued her 
patronage, there would be two — Freycinet, Leon 
Say, Galliffet, Lesseps, Girardin, Edmond About, 
Flaubert, Turguenieff, Leconte de Lisle, Bonnat, 
Bastien Lepage, all of them now but ghosts I have 
met. 

La Nouvelle Revue had its birth in this salon. It 
was to be the organ of the young republic in 
periodical literature. The Revue des Deux Mondes 
had become fossilized. Every number seemed to 
have been dipped in the fountain at Vichy that 
turns everything to stone. It was Orleanist in its 
origin and it is still far from being frankly Re- 
publican to-day. With its aid Madame Adam 
" arrived " in the fullest sense of the term. 

What a change ! She began life as a sort of 
uncertified assistant to her father, a country 
doctor ; then she was given in marriage to the 
village notary, much her senior ; and eventually, 



144 MY HARVEST 

finding both the notary and the village insupport- 
able, she went to Paris to live by her pen. She 
had some reading, more wit, and still more feeling, 
for her stock-in-trade. The feeling stood her in 
best stead. Proudhon had delivered an attack on 
women in the form of certain Idees eminently 
uncomplimentary to the sex. Juliette Lamber 
read it with indignation, and replied to it with 
spirit. Her Idees Anti-Proudhoniennes contended, 
in a series of happy paradoxes, for the perfect 
equality of woman. The book at once attracted 
the flattering notice of George Sand, and from 
that moment Juliette Lamber was " launched." 
The two formed a friendship only severed by 
death ; and the younger rapidly produced volume 
after volume which showed that she had not known 
the author of Indiana in vain. She wrote on 
many subjects, but a passionate vindication of 
the claims of women, as these are understood in 
France, was always her main theme. 

She threw herself into the new enterprise with 
her accustomed ardour. Her time was laid out 
with scientific precision : she rose early to read 
manuscript, to receive contributors, to dictate to 
secretaries. She saw her milliner at breakfast, 
and despatched the meal and her orders together, 
avoiding all waste of time in trying on her own 
garments, by criticizing their fit on a dummy 
moulded exactly to her shape. The work went on 
till it was time for the afternoon drive, and dinner, 
followed by the party or the play. The small hours 
often found her once more at her desk. A short 
break of fitful slumber divided day from day of 



REPUBLICAN FRANCE 145 

this convict toil. Of course it did not last long : 
there came a time when her doctor offered her 
the alternative of rest or death. It produced less 
effect than he expected; but when he threatened 
her with the loss of her good looks she at once gave 
way. She still kept a part of the review to herself, 
especially devoted to the smashing up of Prince 
Bismarck, and she dreamed even of forming a kind 
of social counterpoise to his league of the three 
empires. She undertook missions of her own to 
Rome, to Vienna, to Buda-Pesth, to Petersburg, 
wherever she saw a chance of doing her enemy 
an ill turn. It was the boudoir against the Chan- 
cellor's cabinet ; and unequal as the contest looks 
and was, the former sometimes contrived to score. 
At Petersburg she met the impressionable Skobe- 
leff, and he was not the man to suffer her departure 
to put an end to their acquaintance. He was soon 
in Paris ; and he had not long frequented her 
salon when he indulged in a furious outburst 
against Germany, and, by implication, the alliance 
that was the darling project of the Chancellor's 
life — with what ultimate effect, we have lately seen. 
He was instantly ordered home by his anxious 
master, but the mischief was done. It was easier 
to recall him than to recall his words, which seemed 
to pledge the nation, of which he was the hero, 
and its whole military caste, to undying hostility 
to the German name. 

It pleased her to think that Bismarck stood in 
awe of her, and that he always ran through his 
copy of her review to the cry of ' that woman ! that 
woman ! ' and tore out what was left of his hair. 



146 MY HARVEST 

She had her ups and downs with her own people 
of Paris. At one time they gave her a street to her 
name — Rue JuHette Lamber, by the fortifications. 
At another time, in the course of a tiff, they took 
it away from her, eventually, I believe, making 
amends by its restoration. It is a way they have. 
In the course of the Franco-German war, when 
General Uhrich began his gallant defence of 
Strasburg, no honour of this sort was too high 
for him. With the first reports of his successes he 
had his Rue Uhrich as a matter of course. As 
things still improved (in the papers) he was pro- 
moted to an avenue, and presently he rose to a 
boulevard. But he had hardly reached it when the 
luck began to turn. The Germans captured a 
fort, and with that the General lost his boulevard, 
and was put back one to his avenue. As matters 
went from bad to worse, he lost even this in its 
turn, until once more he had nothing to his name 
but the street with which he set out on his career 
of glory. The news of the capitulation I believe 
stripped him even of that, for a time, if not for 
ever. 



CHAPTER XI 
KING VICTOR HUGO 

REPUBLIC if you like, but still with Hugo 
for its uncrowned king, by virtue alike of 
his genius and of his long record of success without 
a break. He had gone into exile after the coup 
d'etat ; the overthrow of the empire naturally 
restored him to the throne of literature in his good 
city of Paris. A mighty writer, from his youth he 
had scaled the highest peaks of glowing rhetoric 
ever achieved by man. He was of the very few 
who have never known what it is to be other than 
famous : in his teens he was the enfant sublime of 
the apostrophe of Chateaubriand. Yet there was 
something wanting in him, for all that. He was 
another Timotheus of the Dryden ode : he could 
touch to any mood he pleased, though he might 
have been poor company for the actual contact 
with life. Yet in this defect he was perhaps more 
truly himself, more truly the artist. The word of 
power rarely carries with it the knack of the deed : 
the artificers of the emotion seem quite a class 
apart. I was greatly tickled once by an obscure 
entry in the Paris directory : — " So and So — 
Maker of Batons for the Marshals of France." Is 
your poet's function as humble as that ? 

He is best seen, I think, if not always seen 

147 



148 MY HARVEST 

at his best, in the volume on his grandchildren 
George and Jeanne — George, to AngHcize it, 
Jeanne, to let it alone — the weakness of his old 
age. The French public that humoured him in 
every foible was more than indulgent in this. 
Wherever he went, it was understood the children 
must go also. They were all that was left to bind 
him to the most beautiful part of his past. Glory 
he might still have, but without these children 
there would have been none of his own race to 
receive or return his caress in old age. His sons 
had passed away, not before one of them, Charles, 
had given high promise as a man of letters. He 
left his two children and his widow to the care of 
the grandfather ; and from that moment the 
old man and the boy and girl were virtually in- 
separable. These precocious charges shared his 
public triumphs, before they were quite old enough 
to leave his knee without help. George was hardly 
out of the nursery when he supped with actresses, 
it was not quite so compromising as it seems : 
a hundred others were at the board ; and they met 
to celebrate the revival of Ruy Bias. Jeanne had 
seen a whole population almost delirious with joy 
under her windows ; but it was only because she 
sat nestling up to her grandfather, when all Paris 
turned out to celebrate his last birthday but one. 
There was another side to the picture : as Hugo 
was king, these children were no strangers to the 
boredom of royalty. Homage was all very well, 
but sometimes it stood between them and their 
tops and dolls. It was unpleasant to be dogged 
by reporters if you went only so far as the Grand 



KING VICTOR HUGO 149 

Magasin du Louvre for a New Year's toy. It was 
impossible to be always equal to the occasion, 
when you were expected to behave as the grand- 
children of The Light of France. There were 
moments when the infant pair felt an irresistible 
temptation to look stupid ; and it was evidently 
a relief to them when they grew too old to be 
caught and cuddled for purposes of affectionate 
display. To the last the old poet's hands would 
feel for them among the crowd at his receptions, 
even when he was not quite sure on whom they 
would fall. But George would straighten his high 
collar, and Jeanne smooth her long frock as they 
slipped out of reach. 

For them Hugo wrote, or to them he dedicated, 
his volume on The Art of Being a Grandfather. It 
was quite simple : you had only to spoil your 
grandchildren. The spoiling began early ; there 
are verses to Jeanne at Guernsey, in the time of 
exile. It is her entry into his song, and, in free 
translation, it is so entitled. She is talking to her- 
self — ^to herself and to a few passing acquaintance, 
namely the sea, the woods, the mists, the flowers, 
the firmament. What is she saying ? Who knows ? 
But it seems satisfactory, for it ends with a smile. 
" The Other One " is soon called to his side, and 
soon again he is bending over both, as they lie 
asleep, and is accounting for the fact that the arm.s 
of Jeanne are not in evidence, on the supposition 
that she is still half wings. He has seen every- 
thing, and he too is able to say that all is vanity 
— all but love and a nest. 

Next morning their voices will be the first to 



150 MY HARVEST 

reach him through the open window. A Httle 
later, George will be shaking the sawdust out of 
one of his puppets to discover the anatomical 
cause of an injury to the springs ; and still later 
the whole thing will be transferred to Hugo, with 
a piece of twine, for immediate repair. Whatever 
it pleases them to order, he must do. At three 
Jeanne gives him clearly to understand that there 
must be no nonsense when she appears before him 
in the all-conquering brightness of her new frock. 
He yields at once, acknowledging her as " ma 
contemplation, mon parfum, mon ivresse " ; and 
when, some time after, he hears that she is in 
solitary confinement on dry bread, for a breach 
of domestic law, he steals at once to her cell with 
a pot of preserve. This is too much for the powers 
charged with the salvation of society in the im- 
mediate neighbourhood of his hearthstone, and 
their voices are loud in complaint. 

The child knows you ! you'll ruin her — laughing 
every time we frown ! You upset everything ! 

It is all too true ; and he has just enough grace 
left to take the lesson to heart. 

Put me in her place. 

You deserve it certainly. 

" If they do," whispers the infant from her 
corner, " I will bring you some jam." 

Was it always like that ? One hopes not for the 
writer's even more than for the children's sake : 
the poem was at once the child of his old age, 
and the childishness. The spoiling was hardly a 
success in its results, to judge by certain not very 
edifying family quarrels that took place when the 



KING VICTOR HUGO 151 

young people attained to what sometimes failed 
to be years of discretion. Perhaps they found the 
obscurity of the new life as wearisome as the glitter 
of the old. 

When he returned to Paris, every stranger who 
had the slightest title to his regard, and many who 
had not, sought him out. In one aspect, he was 
a kind of pope of democracy in the abstract, though 
in his day he had dearly loved to be a lord ; and 
the pilgrimage for his benediction was quite a 
ceremony. On his return from exile, he at first 
lived in the Rue de Clichy, and it was understood 
that the temple of his abode was open to wor- 
shippers every night for a service often running 
into the small hours. The very slightest introduc- 
tion would do, and even no introduction at all. 
It was rather disappointing for most worshippers, 
especially for those from abroad, who expected to 
find a writer of Hugo's success and reputed wealth 
living in a fine house. You had to mount two or 
three flights of stairs to reach the shrine. The door 
was opened by the cook in her apron, who led you 
along a narrow passage past her kitchen into an 
ante-room. If you came before ten, you had to 
wait. He took his dinner quite as seriously as his 
poetry, and besides he had to think of his guests 
of honour at the board. The waiting-room perhaps 
was better for the study of character. There you 
might be pretty sure to find the venerable inn- 
keeper of Jersey who had stood up for him when 
he got into trouble in that island for a hasty word, 
or the raw correspondent just arrived, or the 
political conspirator — nationality and even politics 



152 MY HARVEST 

no object — or the enthusiastic young person with 
her album under her arm. The foreign poet, of 
course, was rarely to seek — ^the man with a volume 
of verse and a special dedication primed for a 
point-blank discharge. 

By and by each had his opportunity. There 
was a stir in the adjoining room, and no chamber- 
lain was needed to announce — " the King ! " You 
rose and linked up for the circle, while the old man 
passed round, peering with his failing eyesight 
into every face, and if he failed to recognize it, 
still saving himself by his ready tongue, which 
could have excited the sense of gratified vanity 
in an image of stone. Then all were invited to 
follow him into the 'drawing-room, which in taste 
was the ante-room intensified — a hotch-potch of 
curiosities from Europe and the East, arranged by 
the host himself. By way of being everything, he 
was his own upholsterer. Here you joined the 
people who had dined, led by Madame Lockroy, 
the mother of George and Jeanne, and now, by a 
second marriage, the wife of the well-known deputy. 
Paul Meurice, the writer, almost as aged as Hugo, 
was sure to be in attendance, as manager of all the 
master's business affairs. Young Coppee, the poet, 
was often at hand ; and sometimes the scene was 
graced by Renan, Leconte de Lisle, and other men 
of that literary rank. 

Then came the ritual of the occasion, the high 
function, the blessing of His Holiness, as the Pope 
of letters. The poet with the dedication, the 
nymph with the album, or the foreign patriot 
advanced in turn, by invitation, to share the 



KING VICTOR HUGO 153 

pontifical seat on a small sofa that just held two, 
and to pour their several tributes of flattery into 
his ear, returned in kind with a flow of sentiment 
steeped as in the oils of unction. His urbanity 
and desire to please never failed ; the one easy con- 
dition was a return in kind. While this was going 
on, the inner circle of family and friends kept 
strictly to themselves. It was partly in self- 
defence ; so many new people came every week 
that it was impossible to keep account of them, 
but partly also because they did not know better. 
Their mode of receiving was essentially old- 
fashioned. In certain ranks in France people 
keep much apart on these occasions, the ladies on 
one side of the room, the men on the other ; and 
the breaking of any fresh ground in social intimacy 
is understood to be a serious thing. 

One thing was forgotten, in all this — that the 
host was not made of cast iron. Hugo was a very 
old man, and the frequent receptions following the 
dinner soon proved too much for him. His family 
took counsel together, removed him from the 
centre to the circumference of the city, and shortened 
the hours of hospitality : it was now all lights 
out by twelve. He exchanged the old stuffy 
apartment for a roomy house and a garden, and 
the change tended altogether to the improvement 
of his health. 

He was an extraordinary mixture of diverse 
qualities good and bad. His life of exile in the 
Channel Islands was rather a disappointment for 
even some of his worshippers — in the vast sweep 
of its contemplations of nature, man, and God, 



154 MY HARVEST 

from the cliff tops, and the poverty of soul in its 
life of the home. Madame Hugo was left alone to 
anatomize the melancholy of her deserted hearth- 
stone, while he led the throng of worshippers to 
the soirees of a rival, in an establishment over the 
way. There was much to be said on both sides, 
but the situation was one that would have gone 
far to break the heart of a poet who happened to 
have much personal use for his own aspirations. 

The rival accompanied him to Paris for his 
triumphant return. A silver-haired valetudinarian 
of the apartment of the Rue de Clichy, was all 
that was left of the beautiful actress who had 
created some parts in his plays. 

He died as he had lived, in the limelight, and 
to the very last with his unmatchable sense of 
the scene a faire. His will decreed that he should 
be buried, like the poorest of the poor, in a deal 
coffin, and left it there. The Government of course 
placed the coffin under the Arc de VEtoile, and 
draped it with the spoil of the Lyons looms. The 
funeral surpassed the pomp of royalty. The 
poverty of the shell, in its contrast with the 
splendour of its trappings, was the supreme triumph 
of the antithesis in which he excelled. The body 
lay there all night in the glare of thousands of 
torches that must have ^ade the very skies 
wonder what was afoot below. Regiments with 
bowed heads kept the vigil, the garrison of Paris 
turned out to escort him to the grave or keep the 
line. He died " warm " enough to have treated 
himself to a coffin of oak : after providing hand- 
somely for his relations, he was able to leave 



KING VICTOR HUGO 155 

twenty-thousand francs to the poor. Unfortunately 
he forgot to sign the codicil. 

Does it come to this — ^the poet, only for the 
poem, the other man for the act and deed ; the 
orator with a bias for the rear of battle, and on 
bad terms with his shield ? Or does it demand a 
wholly new estimate of the value of the oration 
and the song ? Are great men to be reckoned with 
only in their works, not in their lives ? Even 
then, some of them might hardly bear the test, 
if the works were taken in their entirety. The 
Wagner of the great tetralogy in one thing, the 
Wagner of the lampoon on the starving Paris of 
the siege is quite another. He never forgave the 
French an early indifference to his music which 
was shared wellnigh by all the world. When the 
war came, he took a base revenge in a skit on 
their miseries, which makes poor reading after 
the rhapsodies of the Ring, and yet belongs to 
the all-round view of the man. It was in the form 
of a little drama called The Capitulation : A Comedy 
after the Antique, and — to do Germany justice — it 
was rapidly falling into oblivion in the country of 
its origin, when the vengeful industry of M. Tissot, 
the author of Le Pays des Milliards, unearthed it to 
form a chapter of that popular work. It may still 
bear summary quotation here, as an example of the 
literature of hatred and all uncharitableness, not 
to say of the crass stupidity, that makes wars. 

The scene represents the Place de I'Hotel de 
Ville. In its midst rises the altar of the Republic, 
ornamented with caps of liberty, and, in the rear, 
a balcony — all that is left of the civic edifice. In 



156 MY HARVEST 

the foreground are the colossal statues of Stras- 
burg and of Metz. A new kind of prompter's 
box, with the aperture turned towards the public, 
is placed in front of the altar. 

Victor Hugo emerges from this opening as 
from a subterranean. He wipes his forehead and 
looks around. 

Ah, at last I breathe thee, air of the sacred city. 
And how have I come ? By the sewers. In 
following them I have struck the true path of 
civilization. Yes, I am here, and not by way of 
the Prussian lines. But what is this above my 
head ? a gibbet, no ; a scaffold — perhaps a holy 
guillotine ? ^Vhere is the Hotel de Ville ? 

Faint voices from below the stage. Victor, Victor, 
be one of us. 

Hugo. What's that ? Who calls me back into 
the sewers ? 

He tries to leave the sewer to join the National 
Guards, but he is held firmly by the heels below. 
The guards take him by the hand, and each side 
pulls until his body stretches like an elastic band 
— Wagner trying to be lively. — Suddenly he is 
contracted by a violent start of anguish. The 
guards lose hold ; he sinks and disappears. 

Chorus. The devil has him. 

Commandant. Silence — Wake the Government. 

Chorus (singing) : 

General Trochu, le Galerien 
Que fait il au Mont Valerien ? 
Gouvernemeni ! Bombardement ! 
Bombardement ! Gouvernement ! 
Gouvernemeni ! Gouvernemeni ! Gouvernement ! — ment ! — mcnt ! 



KING VICTOR HUGO 157 

They Jf are still disputing when Nadar appears, 
clad in a limp balloon, to the great terror of the 
spectators. He announces himself as the saviour 
of the republic ; he is ready to pass the Prussian 
lines. Gambetta, who has taken refuge under the 
table, plucks up courage, creeps forth, and insists 
on sharing the adventure. The chorus applauds. 
The dress of the aeronaut is inflated by the breath 
of the citizens ; he mounts, and surveys the world 
— a cheering spectacle. All Europe is preparing 
to intervene in favour of France — in England 
' the Lords and Commons,' here the Russians, the 
Poles and the Cossacks ; there the Spaniards, the 
Portuguese and the Jews. (A note by the trans- 
lator explains that Wagner is the deadly enemy of 
this race, and has written a pamphlet against 
their composers.) 

While this is going on above the earth, the 
delighted spectators hear a strange noise — as of 
the clashing of kettles — from below, which serves 
as an accompaniment to the chant of the spirits 
of the sewers. 

A chorus and a ballet follow, and the curtain 
falls on the apotheosis of Victor Hugo amid Bengal 
fires. 

Piteously, gross and foolish no doubt, though 
years after its publication in Paris, the memory 
of it still rankled in the French mind, and the 
first attempt to introduce the Wagner music at 
the Pasdeloup concerts nearly led to a riot. 



CHAPTER XII 

A RUSSIAN REALIST 

I HAD kept up relations with the New York 
World, and as the result of some experimental 
letters I became its resident correspondent in 
Paris. I worked my way in by sending them 
what I thought their people wanted, when it also 
happened to be what I wanted to write : one 
must think a little of one's fellow creatures, after 
all. This I have always found the best of intro- 
ductions. The work alone must do it in the main, 
and editors who know their business are naturally 
of that way of thinking too. Paris, and a paper 
ready to let me say my say in it ! What more 
could I need ? 

About this time I began to know Verestchagin, 
the Russian painter. He had a studio at Maisons- 
Laffitte, a few miles from Paris. I soon came to 
know him quite well, for he invited study. In 
regard, at least to his native Russia, he was not one, 
but all mankind's epitome. All the racial strains 
were in him, with perhaps a little too much of 
the Tartar for the perfect harmony. At times 
he seemed quite a freshman from the wilds — 
sudden and quick in quarrel, snapshot in judg- 
ment, bitter in blame, and rather contemptuous 

158 



A RUSSIAN REALIST 159 

of the " manners and customs of modern society," 
though he could hold his own there when he liked. 
He was at once candid and crafty, yet both without 
hypocrisy. When he spoke, it was often to rap 
out his thought about you or your proceedings 
with the most engaging frankness ; when he held 
his tongue, you had nobody to thank but yourself 
if he got the better of you : there was no false 
pretence. When he gave his trust it was whole- 
heartedly : he had great faith in the English 
word. It is not an amiable character, neither is 
that of Bazarof in Turguenieff's Fathers and Sons, 
but it is very Russian. Geniality was not in the 
composition, but there was much else that was 
downright good. 

He was a great illustrator, rather than an 
artist, with sheer reality for his end and aim. 
His pictures were human documents in oils, that 
and nothing else : the naked truth without phrase. 
So are those of his countryman Repnin. Look 
at the latter's peasants of the Volga towing the 
barge ; nothing picturesque about them, mere 
human beasts of burden with centuries of in- 
breeding in misery and privation in every brutish 
face. Gorki in literature strikes the same note, 
with others quite too numerous to mention in 
both kinds. It is brush and pen in the service of 
social upheaval, as once they were in the service 
of religion. 

He came of good family and was educated for 
the navy, but he slipped out of that to get his 
training in art at Munich and in the Paris schools. 
He became the most mercilessly truthful painter 



160 MY HARVEST 

of war I think the world has ever seen. How he 
laughed at Horace Vernet, and his whole set. 
" Do you call that war — these spick-and-span 
generals prancing on circus hacks, these clouds 
of smoke to hide the horrors, these ' moments of 
victory ' focussed for stage effect ? " His pet 
aversion in this line was Vernet's standardized 
study of Napoleon crossing the Alps. Even the 
august Meissonier was not spared for the unreality 
of his snow, in the " 1812 " : — " I wonder if he 
has ever seen such a thing." He was of Byron's 
mind : — " war's a brain - spattering, windpipe- 
slitting art." He photographed nature with an 
eye that was truer than the lens, and he never 
asked her to look pleasant. He was in Central 
Asia for the campaign of the Khanates, and had 
the glories of the mosques of Samarkand for his 
backgrounds, and for the main business a welter 
of blood. No other man of his time had such a 
sure touch for character in race types — Tartars 
in their mansions of felt, far exceeding the scale 
of the tent, Afghans, manifestly but Jews of the 
lost tribes, cornered at last, begging dervishes, 
all rags fat and filth, Kirghiz swells with hawk 
and hound. 

He did British India in just the same way, from 
the caves of Ellora to the temples, with their 
priests, deities, monsters thrown in. Then, going 
out of his beat of things seen, he imagined the 
Mutiny with the sun streaming down on rebels 
tied to their guns, and ready to go up as manhood, 
and come down as rain. His appetite for horrors 
was positively insatiable, and he found a fresh 



A RUSSIAN REALIST 161 

crop in the Russo-Turkish war. Here, as often 
before, he took a share in the fighting, for 
patriotism, as he put it to himself, but I fancy only 
as a sop to the old Adam that was deep down in 
his nature. He went out with a torpedo boat and 
tried to sky a Turkish ship in the Danube, missed 
it, and was nearly killed for his pains by the fire 
from the decks. He liked fighting for its own sake : 
the purpose in painting it was still but the after- 
thought. It fascinated him as crime fascinated 
Dostoieffsky. Certainly you came away from his 
work with a disgust for slaughter, and certainly he 
always told the truth about it free from patriotic 
bias. 

His All Quiet at Shipka was the story of that 
dreadful winter in the Pass — scene 1, the Russian 
sentry trotting up and down to keep himself alive ; 
scene 2, the same, numbed and yielding to the 
sleep hunger ; scene 3, a snow - covered mound 
where there was once a man, with the stock phrase 
of the despatches for his epitaph. He saw the 
great assault on Plevna when a hundred thousand 
men were hurled at the Turkish entrenchments, in a 
fatuous attempt to offer the fortress as a birthday 
gift to the Tsar. This and its sequel, lines and 
lines of the Russian dead lying in their shallow 
graves to await the blessing of the priests, or, 
worse still, a vast acreage of the living writhing in 
every contortion of agony under a broiling sun. 
The birthday scene bore an ironical significance 
that was the most appalling of all. The assault is 
at its hottest in the valley ; and on a hill top, 
quite out of harm's way, sits the Tsar and Little 



162 MY HARVEST 

Father of his people, in his arm-chair, watching it 
through an opera-glass, with a knot of persons in 
attendance to give him the points. This got the 
painter into trouble when the pictures went into 
the exhibition gallery. The court party were 
shocked. " Why didn't you paint His Majesty 
at the head of his brave army ? " " Because I 
never saw him there. But it's easy to destroy the 
evidence " ; and in a fit of rage he seized a knife 
and slashed the canvas to ribbons before their 
eyes. 

Everything about him was grandiose. He was 
one of the handsomest fellows I ever met, with his 
fine figure, his great flowing beard, and eyes of 
fire. But the Tartar was always there under the 
veneer of civilization, only waiting for the scratch. 
He was the educated savage, the most formidable 
of all combinations in our epoch of semi-civilized 
man. Like the savage, his decisions in the most 
momentous affairs came with the speed of light. 
He would set off to the ends of the earth with 
hardly a handbag for his kit, and make for the 
first train or the first boat that would put him 
on his way. Why trouble about packing : it 
was so easy to get what you wanted as the want 
came. 

At Maisons-Laffitte he had the largest studio 
in the world, for what that was worth — the floor 
space a hundred feet or so by fifty, the doorway 
like an opening in a barn, a window to match, 
and with that the whole thing fixed on a huge turn- 
table to enable it to follow the course of the sun. 
It was rather suggestive of scene-painting if you 



A RUSSIAN REALIST 163 

like, so was the work, but it was quite good of its 
kind in its rendering of the verisimilitude of life 
and character, and he had no concern about 
anything else. He was sometimes served here 
by a Russian peasant who did his odd jobs in the 
carpentering line, and who, as a national peculiarity, 
wore his shirt outside, all the way down. The 
first apparition of this figure at the railway station, 
as a consignment from the Steppe, was dismay 
for the local authority. The gendarme on duty 
took him into friendly custody, and we had to 
set forth together to get him out of bond. He shook 
himself when he got in, and at once went to bed 
on the bare boards in a cupboard under the stairs. 
The relations between the pair were still the old 
protective ones of master and serf, though there 
was much attachment on both sides. Jacob — such 
was his name — was regularly taken to the vapour 
bath once a week, and otherwise seen to as a 
good traveller sees to his horse. He had come from 
his village and he was sent back to it with all care, 
when his spell of service was over. Part of his 
wages went in remittances to his wife, and it was 
understood that, if she failed in any point of duty 
during his absence, she might get a beating on his 
return. The arrangement suited both sides, as 
covering all misdemeanours whatsoever, and leaving 
all clear for a fresh start. 

Western civilization always irked the master, 
though he had seen as much of it as anyone to the 
manner born. If he had known enough English, 
and he knew a good deal, he would have called 
it namby-pamby. When he exhibited at the 



164 MY HARVEST 

Grosvenor with the gallery all to himself, he found 
the directors with their methodical ways and 
their regard for the conventions, very much of a 
trial. It was the Asian collection, and by way of 
commending it to the British public, he rigged up 
a weird figure, as from Bokhara, and stuffed it 
with a sandwich man to perambulate Bond Street 
by way of bringing custom to the show. The 
directors objected, and I believe he told them to 
go somewhere, or to be sent there post-haste, 
with the aid of a pistol which he always carried 
in his pocket as a survival of his life in the 
wild. 

Once, in Paris, he nearly used the weapon in 
a very distressful scene. He held an exhibition 
at the offices of the Gaulois, a paper at that time 
edited by one of his countrymen, an ex-professor 
of a Russian university. Verestchagin hated the 
man, because he had brought some of the revolu- 
tionary students to grief by denouncing them to 
the authorities. This rankled in his mind, and 
still he had to keep on terms, since, for the moment, 
their business relations were both under the same 
roof. One day we strolled in from the Boulevard 
and my friend went up to the editor to see how 
things were going on, while I awaited his return 
in the antechamber. Presently I heard angry 
voices from the sanctum, and I rushed in with the 
attendant to find them facing one another on 
opposite sides of the table, each with a pistol 
at the other's head, and exchanging a preliminary 
fire of abuse in the choicest Russian. I never 



A RUSSIAN REALIST 165 

stopped to ask Verestchagin what it was about 
till I had him safe in the street. " The wretch," he 
said. " I told him what I thought of him, and for 
two pins " (free translation from the French) " I'd 
have shot him like a dog." 

With all these traits he was quite wheedling 
with the critics when they came for the notices, 
and even went the length of offering the general 
public free teas with no stint of caviar. The last 
was not a bribe : it was only his sense of the 
proprieties on the part of an artist with callers 
under his roof. 

At about this time, I took a holiday trip to 
Vienna for my first view of the German at home. 
The familiar characterization of these southerners 
as the French of Germany is fairly exact. The 
South German is pleasure-loving, easy, affable, by 
the mere fact of his greater intimacy with the 
sun. His contact with so many alien races of the 
same cast has also kept him up to the mark of the 
social amenities. Hungary, and his slice of southern 
Poland have been of priceless value to him. Every 
Hungarian is a bit of a Don Quixote ; most of the 
Poles foolishly put their poetry into their lives, 
instead of into their books. The Slav element, 
and the Latin, have been precious influences for 
the German of the south. His ideal is the joy- 
ride through life, tempered only by respect for 
the police. One makes his acquaintance without 
effort. My memory of him and of his womankind 
is dotted with the delights of little suppers, where 
you might say anything that came into your head, if 



166 MY HARVEST 

you only knew how to say it, of little musical 
soirees where you still heard melody of the good 
old-fashioned sort, of genial professors who never 
talked the shop of culture out of business hours, 
of visits to the studios — to Makart's, especially, 
as the leading man of the day. 

Makart was rather stand-oflfish, no doubt, but that 
was only because he had to live up to his reputation 
as a master ; and it soon wore off. Like Verest- 
chagin, he painted on the colossal scale : his 
Entry of Charles V into Antwerp was as exacting 
in the matter of house-room as a masterpiece of 
Veronese. It was all love and war, the first 
especially in its most voluptuous effects — ^the 
hero with a sort of bodyguard of nymphs who 
had given themselves scant time to dress, in 
their haste to show the way to the primrose path. 
It took even Paris by storm, at one of the great 
international exhibitions — not without some mis- 
givings in regard to its real value as art. He carried 
the craze for splendour into his private life. His 
vast studio was rather a showroom than a work- 
shop, a glory of choice cabinets, carpets, trophies 
of arms. 

His followers found it easier to affect his taste 
for glaring lights and bituminous shadows than 
to catch the trick of his genius. One of them, 
whose acquaintance I made, was keen on trying 
his own luck with the method at the French Salon. 
I duly promised to do what I could for him, and, 
when he arrived, offered to make him acquainted 
with Sargent as a coming man. He hummed and 
hawed, and said he only wanted to know first-rates. 



A RUSSIAN REALIST 167 

Paris soon knew him no more, and I was avenged 
on a silly fellow while Sargent was saved from a 
bore. 

Among memorable incidents of this Vienna 
visit was the sight of the Crown Prince Rudolph 
and his wife, the Princess Stephanie of Belgium, 
at the opera house. It was Owen Meredith's 
" she looked like a queen in her box that night " 
in actual realization. They scarcely spoke, and 
both seemed to long for more congenial society. 
I hope I remarked as much at the time, and that 
for this impression I owe nothing to my after 
knowledge of one of the most mysterious tragedies 
of history. 

Some time after I was able to make a much 
longer stay in Berlin. There was work to do, and 
with it the attraction of another one-man show by 
Verestchagin. He rarely, if ever to my knowledge, 
sent his pictures to the ordinary galleries. He 
took subject by subject — Central Asia, India, 
the Russo-Turkish war — and worked on it till he 
had exhausted it and himself. Then each collection 
went the round of the capitals of Europe, with 
the hope of the great cities of America to follow, 
and sometimes the realization. This enabled him 
to show his work to the best advantage, free from 
all interference by hanging committees, while it 
ministered to his love of distinction. There was 
the series, one and indivisible, and, to keep it 
intact, he often refused the most tempting offers 
for single works. His aim, sometimes successful, 
was to have it bought in bulk by public subscrip- 
tion, and housed in a state gallery to glorify his 



168 MY HARVEST 

name for ever. The system had the fatal dis- 
advantage of compelHng him to be his own 
business man. He took incredible pains to effect 
the miracle of the dual personality. The works 
were packed under his eye, and sent off in 
waggon loads suggestive of the transport of an 
army corps. All this, for the time being, made 
him quite a different kind of man from the 
creature of impulse I have already described. He 
brooded over his treasures, he intrigued for 
them at Custom House doors, he darted half-way 
across Europe to receive them at their journey's 
end. Yet again, with this strain to aggravate his 
natural irritability, we may imagine the occasional 
explosions. 

In Berlin it was a peculiar trial because he had 
determined to surpass himself there. It was to 
be all the collections in one, in so far as they were 
at his disposal, a review of the labours of a lifetime. 
He took a whole theatre — Kroll's ; shut out all 
the daylight, and had the place lit by electricity 
— needless to say at what expense. He hung it 
with velvet from gallery to pit to hide the box 
openings, and give it the effect of one large hall, 
and closed the gap of the stage with his largest 
picture, the Prince of Wales entering Jeypore. 
You stepped from the raw day outside into a 
fairyland of light with its paths bordered by shrubs 
and flowers. With all this there was music from 
artfully managed recesses where a choir of Russian 
singers, imported for the occasion, wailed national 
airs. 

Berlin would contentedly have paid its mark 



A RUSSIAN REALIST 169 

for entry, to yield him a fortune, but he insisted 
on lowering the price to a sum equal to about three- 
pence of our money, with, I believe, a reduction 
for schools. It was the only possible way of courting 
financial failure, and he took it in the interest of 
his glory. The Berliners talk of it to this day. 
Everybody came — that was enough for him. All 
the Court, with the Crown Prince Frederick, and 
the Princess nee Princess Royal of England. The 
old Kaiser, as the exception that proved the rule, 
stood out, because he thought that such a profusion 
of the naked truth about war might damp the 
ardour of his troops. All the Generals, Moltke 
among them, sleek and silent as one of his own 
guns in time of peace, giant officers of the guard 
with impossible shoulders, tailor made, legs equally 
so, the trouser fitting like a skin, with clinking 
spur and clanking sabre, in which they no doubt 
went to bed. In their wake came the professorial 
classes, the leaders of society, and finally the 
million almost in full count. 

The painter's brother, a captain of Cossacks, 
watched over it with ten times the zeal of a hired 
attendant to parry the elbow or finger-thrusts of 
the crowd, when they threatened to damage the 
wares. Here and there some canvas showed a 
graze in spite of him, and he had to take a wigging 
from his chief, with bowed head. 

" Alexandre, Alexandre, they've scratched my 
Dervish at Prayer — what have you been about ? " 

" I've done my best, brother, but I can't be 
everywhere." 

" Do you hear him ? do you hear him ? he can't 



170 MY HARVEST 

be everywhere. Oh the droll fellow (le plaisant). 
Did you ever see the like ! " 

He died in character : when his hour came, it 
found him on the Russian flagship at Port Arthur 
that struck a floating mine, and went to the 
bottom with nearly every soul on board. 

Ay me ! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas 
Wash far away, — where'er thy bones are hurled. 



CHAPTER XIII 

PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 

MY stay in Germany belonged to the period of 
a new Fatherland in the world of ideas. The 
intellectual movement was to organize and extend 
the conquests of the Germany of arms. The 
nation had won its unity on the battle-field ; it 
had yet to constitute itself in other directions. This 
was to be done in new ways of living, a new 
outlook all round. The old Fatherland of the poets 
and the professors had done its work in preparation 
for 1870 : a generation was now ready for the 
fullness of the pride of life. 

The 'eighties, therefore, marked an epoch quite 
as important in its way as that of the great war. 
The German was now to realize himself, in a sort 
of ecstasy of patriotic brag, as the heir of the ages, 
and as the chosen one of the scheme of Providence, 
for the shaping of the spirit of man. The earlier 
influences had left him patient, laborious, sturdy, 
pious, and with most of his interests centred in 
the home. He was now to flower into the ruler 
rather than the mere citizen of the world. He 
already had a new music — epos and all — the time 
had come to scrap his rich endowment in the 
philosophies, as a mere second best, still good 
enough for humanity at large, and to start another 

171 



172 MY HARVEST 

exclusively for his own use. This was to make 
him a being quite apart in the evolution of the race, 
with Prussia for its hard core. 

Berlin, as I saw it, became more than ever the 
city of the back seat for the foreigner : " Pride in 
their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of 
human kind pass by " was no longer a poetical 
hyperbole. The military heroes reeked of self- 
sufficiency, from the officer of the guard to the 
humblest captain of a marching regiment. The 
very politeness seemed machine-made. People 
met for social enjoyment in unions organized under 
the most rigid rules ; nothing seemed to come 
with the charm of accident. To borrow a cant 
term from the new philosophy, it was but the will 
to good breeding, and as part of the will to power. 
Their sport was cultivated for the muscle, not the 
muscle for the sport. This method of approach 
seemed to extend to everything but the table 
manners, which still, from the pocket comb to 
the management of the knife and fork, were those 
of the old dispensation. There was nothing of the 
soft play of life in it. It recalled a severe criticism 
of the Sartor, that Carlyle never forgot. " Our 
author reminds us of the German baron, who, 
when asked why he was jumping over the chairs 
and tables, said he was trying to be lively." 
Equestrians in the park put their steeds to the pace 
like circus riders, with swelling breast and haughty 
eye that seemed to solicit, or rather demand, a 
" hand " from the crowd. 

It was part of my duty as a foreign resident to 
show my passport at the police office of my district. 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 173 

One day when I was doing that, a poor " Bobby" of 
the rank and file came in to give an account of his 
stewardship ; and sheer nervousness, I suppose, 
made him blunder in some detail. His petty 
superior positively barked — there is no other word 
for it — a reprimand, until the other became speech- 
less with terror and confusion. He, of course, took 
his revenge on the private citizen. I heard after- 
wards of an arrest for some small offence in the 
public street. The offender, who had suddenly 
taken to his heels, was pursued, tripped up, and 
in a trice found himself on the fiat of his back with 
the points of two police sabres at his throat. I 
was calling one day on an old friend in a public 
office, when his chief entered the room to discuss 
some matter connected with the day's work. My 
friend, who was quite on the same social level, 
immediately sprang to his feet for the salute, 
and began every phrase of the conversation with a 
";<2, Herr Direktor,'' or a '' nein, Herr Direktor,'' 
which, in any other country, would have been 
rather out of place as between an office-boy and a 
Prime Minister. The Kaiser took his daily drive 
in Unter den Linden with the same curious obser- 
vances. The sentry at the Brandenburger Gate 
had to become aware of him in the distance, and 
as he came within hail to raise a raucous shout that 
brought out the whole guard to seize their rifles, 
stacked for the salute. He seemed a pathetic 
figure, as the only being in all his dominions 
without a superior entitled to the kotow. 

Nothing seemed to come " natural " to them, 
except drill for every spontaneous movement of 



174 MY HARVEST 

the soul. In literature they would have been 
capable of putting poets into commission, as in 
war they have already put Caesar and Napoleon — 
not forgetting Attila and Tamerlane. 

The first essay in modernity originated with 
the cult of Zola, by a band of precocious lads who, 
in the 'sixties, had been spoon-fed on his writings, 
and began to feel the longing for a new departure 
for its own sake. Of course, it was but another 
" Stiirm und Drang," a something that seemed to 
derive its motive force from a steam-engine. 
German literature is peculiarly subject to these 
nervous disorders. The classic case is that of the 
Olympian Goethe and his Sorrows of Werther, in 
which he deliberately caught the complaint as the 
shortest way of getting it over. 

*' Down with tradition," was the cry. The 
topsy-turvy was to be absolute and not only in 
the arts, but in education, psychology, morals, 
politics, in the latter especially as the leading line 
of the new firm. All instruction that was not 
based on the intensive culture of the will was to 
die the death. The first leader of consequence was 
Michael Conrad, a Munich painter who saw litera- 
ture as a sort of voluntary on the big drum. 
German-like, he founded a regular society for its 
propaganda, with a secretariat and an " organ " 
as a matter of course. This lively little thing 
manifested against " emasculated science," " fried 
fish criticism," " flunkey ism," and all else pertain- 
ing in hard words ; though it was still but Carlyle's 
baron going methodically to work in the art of 
being without art. Berlin, naturally, was soon 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 175 

in the field, and, characteristically, it began by 
doubling the local leadership with the brothers 
Henry and Julius Hart. At first they fought 
Munich for supremacy, but soon all joined hands. 
The programme was naturally destructive at the 
expense of the old gang. Dahn, Freytag, Spiel- 
hagen, and others were immolated on the altars 
of the faith, as mad dilettanti, guilty in some 
mysterious way of furthering " the work of hell," 
while Turguenieff, Dostoieffsky, Tolstoy, Bjornson, 
and Ibsen — assuredly to the surprise of many of 
them — were claimed as patrons of the new thought. 

The movement was much more serious in 
another field, history. It is deeply interesting to 
see how an outburst of creative energy in research 
that began with Niebuhr and universal sympathy 
should end in a Prussian school with a doctrine of 
universal conquest. Germany has long been the 
annalist of the world, but while she once wrote 
wholly in the service of truth, she now writes 
largely in the service of self-love. The change may 
be traced by the English reader in Mr. G. P. 
Gooch's recent History and Historians of the 
Nineteenth Century, a glory of British scholarship 
and learning in the literature of its kind. A History 
of Histories, it might more aptly be called, in its 
fascinating form of a history of historians. But 
the reader must find his moral for himself, for 
Mr. Gooch has none to enforce. 

When beaten by Napoleon, the Germans natur- 
ally began to set their house in order to save them 
from extinction. They turned to history to learn 
what they had done in the past for national 



176 MY HARVEST 

regeneration, and what they might hope to do 
again. We know how well they took the lesson 
to heart. Their success was so dazzling in 1870-71 
that they began to dream of universal empire. 
They had conquered France, why not the planet 
next ? It was intoxication, but the historians had 
their share, and a deep one, of the draught. 
History gradually became the handmaid of this 
ambition, and at last grew to be the degraded 
study which it is with some of them to-day. This 
was mainly the work of the Prussian or Prussianiz- 
ing historians. 

The mighty Niebuhr was the founder of the 
science of history in its day of wisdom, justice, and 
power. His thesis was the evolution of freedom 
in human institutions, and he could afford to do 
full justice to all nations, and especially to ours, 
for their share of the work. Roman history was 
more especially his subject : he may be said to 
have dug up old Rome with his pen. He was too 
much of the period of national humiliation to be 
without his feelings, but he ever strove to keep them 
in due subordination to the facts. Nationalism and 
the dread of revolution were the dominant princi- 
ples of his political philosophy. 

Eichhorn, the most important of his immediate 
successors, went beyond this in his resolve to 
dedicate himself to history as a labour of construc- 
tive patriotism. Then came the Grimms, especially 
Jacob, with their glorious anthologies of the old 
German literature for the discovery of the Folk 
soul. If this was bias, it was only the natural one 
for Germany, without being against the foreigner. 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 177 

" Prussia is done for," said Napoleon, " she has 
disappeared from the map of Europe." Even 
Goethe despaired : " shake your chains as you 
will, he is too strong for you." Wilken, a pupil of 
Eichhorn, went a step farther in his History of the 
Crusades, with Germany as the leading power in 
Europe. A history of the Middle Ages, in his view, 
should begin and end with the German race. 

Ranke, the other great monumental figure after 
Niebuhr, was from first to last a sobering force. 
With him history was simply a great object-lesson 
in ethics and religion, and only with all possible 
reverence for the facts. He was as fair to the 
Popes as to Luther and the Reformation : balance 
was the only passion of his placid soul. He was 
fair to Prussia — too discriminatingly so to please 
many, Carlyle among them — for now, in the 
middle of the century, the taint of partisanship 
had become as indelible as a birth-mark. He simply 
refused to discuss the annexation of Silesia as a legal 
act. He was fair to England for the order and 
conservation of her march of progress. He wel- 
comed the war of 1870, but mainly as a triumph 
of conservative over revolutionary Europe, and 
he was wholly free from the jingo taint. His rivals 
grew more and more impatient of his virtues : 
one dubbed him a sort of historian in kid gloves ; 
another, a mere aesthete, whose outlook was that 
of an artist and not of a statesman. For all that, 
as Mr. Gooch shows, he was " the first to divorce 
the study of the past from the passions of the 
present, and to relate what actually occurred." 
And this, too, on the authority of the strictly 



178 MY HARVEST 

contemporary sources of the period in hand. He 
founded the science of historical evidence and withal 
was " beyond comparison the greatest historical 
writer of modern times." 

But the Germanizing professors, if not the purely 
Prussian variety, were now maturing for their 
entry into politics as a party rather than a school. 
With them history was but a setting for the burning 
questions of the hour, and the idol of impartiality 
stood in their way. As far back as 1826 Leo had 
thought proper to censure what he was pleased to 
call Ranke's " timid avoidance of personal views," 
by which he meant his refusal to tilt the scale ; 
and to talk of his work as mere porcelain painting 
for ladies and amateurs. His own work in history 
was certainly not open to that reproach : he seems 
never to have fastened on a theme without trying 
to make it serve the purpose of propaganda. 
" He glories in Hildebrand and Canossa, approves 
the inquisition and the Albigensian crusade, 
condemns Wycliffe and Hus, denounces Luther 
as the enemy of authority, and justifies Alva's 
reign of blood." This gave the patriots a method, 
if it did not give them a doctrine worthy of the 
name, and they were soon able to claim the 
illustrious Gervinus as a leader. The active life, 
he declared, was the middle point of all history. 
One of his heroes was Machiavelli, who " dared 
all for the good of his country." In this instance, 
indeed, it was only action for the promotion of 
democratic, as distinct from merely nationalistic 
ideas. He witnessed the unification of Germany 
without enthusiasm, and denounced Bismarck 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 179 

for the war of 1864. He even kept his cap on his 
head when every other was in the air for Sedan. 
" I have always urged a federation, not a Prussian 
hegemony based on force." He " hardly belonged 
to any nation," said Treitschke, as he brushed 
him aside. 

Waitz discovered that the early German tribes 
were highly civilized ; and when one critic hinted 
that he ought therefore to have put them more 
into the picture, he excused himself on the ground 
that his authorities were chiefly " foreigners " — 
Tacitus, no doubt, among the number. Giese- 
brecht, a thorough conservative in politics, brings 
in the thin end of the wedge of the Imperial theme 
— a powerful empire, a vigorous church, a God- 
fearing people. He rises to enthusiasm over the 
emperors : " they made the German the people of 
peoples." Exactly what is thought at the Berlin 
Schloss to-day, exactly what its master thought 
when he got rid of Bismarck, in order to appro- 
priate all the glory of the achievement to the 
dynasty. Even Sybel will hear nothing of this in 
regard to the emperors — the only hope of salvation 
for the bewildered reader is in the way these 
authorities contradict each other on the facts. He 
saw that all this reverence for the old empire was 
but a new-fangled thing, even if he did not fully 
suspect what purposes it was to be made to serve. 
Giesebrecht, he thought, would have done better 
if he had moderated his raptures, and struck a 
profit and loss account. The huge centralized 
empire of Charlemagne was detrimental to the races 
that needed free play. The subsequent failure of 



180 MY HARVEST 

Otto's attempt to revive it was a blessing for 
German nationality. Still, he added, as though by 
way of putting himself in order, Prussia was the true 
leader. At the same time, a scandalized Slavonic 
scholar rapped out a warning note against the 
limitless idealization of the German race. It 
passed all bounds ; the German historian had 
two moral standards : one for Germans, another 
for the rest of mankind. While the Germans were 
extolled as the embodiment of every virtue, their 
age was bloody and dark. 

The Prussian school began with Dahlmann, 
who had begun to write before 1848. But all he 
wanted was a Liberal empire under Prussian 
leadership, with constitutionalism for its corner- 
stone. Duncker, who followed, naturally wanted 
more : the German question was not one of 
freedom, but of force. He supported Bismarck in 
his conflict with the Parliament : " His writings 
breathe an almost mystical devotion to the 
dynasty." He had his reward, unsought in all 
probability, in his appointment as a kind of tutor 
to the Crown Prince Frederick, and Historiographer 
of Brandenburg. The next highest bidder was 
Droysen, pointing the moral for action, with a 
genial glorification of the military caste, and the 
militant statesmen. Prussia must not content 
herself any longer with being the second power in 
Germany — Bismarck is delighted with that. The 
old gang of moderation and common-sense protests 
against a book of this writer as " a bad novel," but 
he goes cheerily on to a verdict in favour of the 
Prussian claim to Silesia, in spite, as we have seen, 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 181 

of the fact that Ranke had dedined to discuss it 
on its ethical side. Droysen discovers in his sources 
everything that he wants to find, even when it is not 
there. And finally he touches the bed-rock of 
false principles on which all his followers have since 
built with the declaration that the state, which is 
the all in all, is not the sum of the individuals whom 
it comprehends, nor does it arise from their will. 
The present Kaiser, in his turn, must have been 
delighted with this : he once sent a special 
messenger to Parliament to the effect that he had 
no knowledge of the people as the source or 
sanction of his power. 

The current has now become too strong for 
Sybel, and he shows his effectual repentance in a 
fierce onslaught on the French Revolution in 
every single energy of its being — an outburst that 
led Frederic Harrison to characterize him as 
" little more than a German Alison." In a moment 
of unwonted candour he owns his weakness : "I 
am four-sevenths politician and three-sevenths 
professor." After Sedan, he is Bismarck's man, 
body and soul, and is ready to defend the awful 
crime of the doctoring of the text of the Ems 
telegram that goaded France into the war. It was 
" shortened " only, not altered. He met with his 
appropriate reward. He had retained enough of his 
old doubts, as to the supreme part played by the 
emperors in German history, to venture to show 
that Bismarck counted for more than his nominal 
master in the overthrow of France. This angered 
the new master, the Kaiser who is still with us. 
He not only vetoed the grant of a prize to Sybel 



182 MY HARVEST 

for one of his works, but excluded him from the 
archives of the Foreign Office — a touch of petty 
spite that may help us to take his measure. 

The greatest and last of the band was Treitschke. 
" The most eloquent of preachers, the most fervid 
of apostles, the most passionate of partisans," says 
Mr. Gooch, " he most completely embodies the 
blending of history and politics which it was the 
aim of the School to achieve." He simplifies the 
issue at the start, by adopting as his life motto : 
" In the dust with all the enemies of the Branden- 
burg." Germany is to be not only one empire, but 
one state. The smaller fry are not to be federated 
into union, but annexed. Prussia is to attack 
them straight away, apparently without waiting 
for the formalities of a quarrel. Hanover, Hesse, 
Saxony " ripe and over-ripe for annihilation. My 
father will grieve over it — he was himself a Saxon 

— but " He, too, stood the test of the Ems 

telegram, which is a sort of touchstone for the best 
or, rather, the worst of them, without a pang. 
Even Sybel, as we have seen, could find nothing 
better to say in defence of it than that nothing 
had been added, only something left out. The 
other disdains all finessing of that sort. " What a 
humiliation we have escaped ! Had not Bismarck 
so cleverly edited the telegram the King would have 
given way again." The history of Germany, in 
which he reveals himself in these interesting lights, 
comes into universal acceptance, and not as a mere 
history with others, not even as the history, but 
as German History — for good and all. His brother 
professors bleat protest here and there, but he 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 183 

can afford to pay no heed to them : Germany has 
found what it wanted, its god of Grab. The old 
superseded deity of judgment and mercy was 
still able to discharge a Parthian shot before 
retiring from the scene. " God cannot take me 
away till I have written my sixth volume," cried 
Treitschke ; yet he died while it was still to write. 

He had all the gifts indispensable to a task which 
was to be brutal, reactionary, and a standing out- 
rage on the human conscience from first to last, 
the magic of style, a power of loving and hating 
with almost volcanic force, a pen that was also a 
sword. All the catchwords of national and racial 
hatred were at his finger ends. He honours 
England with the bitterest detestation, " the Bible 
in one hand, an opium pipe in the other " — pipe and 
Bible as a matter of course. The Jews catch it in 
just the same way, and the anti-Semitism of 
Stocker comes into its own. The hope of banishing 
war is not only meaningless, but immoral. The 
duel is a discipline for it : "If the strong van- 
quishes the weak, it is the law of life." It is 
history treated by a prophet scold of the first class, 
to meet the wants of the all-conquering race — 
history drawn and twisted into the required 
shapes like a piece of Austrian bentwood. It 
degrades colonization to the level of a mere paro- 
chial extension of the German norm in every 
institution and in every detail of corporate life, 
the very thing it is not and never can be in our 
day. 

The end and the be-all of the state, we are told, 
is power ; he who is not man enough to look this 



184 MY HARVEST 

truth in the face should not meddle with politics. 
A sacrifice made to an alien nation is not only 
immoral : it contradicts the idea of self-preserva- 
tion which is the highest ideal of a state. God 
will see to it that war shall constantly recur as a 
drastic medicine for the human race. In one of his 
functions Treitschke is a sort of understudy of the 
furies of the old horde, shrieking on the new one 
to rapine and blood. 

But one more prophet of wrath was wanted, and 
he came — Nietzsche. He is a thrice-told tale by 
this time, yet he has been strangely misconceived. 
His true significance, I suspect, is the one thing we 
have all missed. Historically, he continues the 
line of the great satirists of the world, as the 
Rabelais or the Swift of his time. To construe him 
literally is to degrade the estimate of his remarkable 
powers. He was a man-hater at war with his age, 
a super-sensitive, with a skin disease of vanity 
finally burrowing down to the roots of his being — 
a Timon of Athens, if you like, with Wagner for 
one of his ingrates. His philosophy is but his ven- 
geance on the whole pack, in the form of fable. 
To take his Superman with a grave face as the 
forecast of the course of human development is to 
be in the same plight as the two right reverend 
prelates who discussed the import of Gulliver. 
There were some things in it, said one, that almost 
passed belief, while the other made bold to declare 
that, for his part, he didn't believe a word of it. 
Nietzsche's concept of the Son of Man as a patriot 
trickster in the service of the Rabbis was assuredly 
not his belief, but one that in his wrath he would 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 185 

fain attribute to the bulk of his fellow-creatures. 
His girding at morals was but compassion for 
its low estate, rendered, of course, in the terms of 
irony. His dog- whip, as the only instrument for the 
government of women, was, equally in the nature of 
the case, no personal conviction of one who owed 
everything to the love and care of the most devoted 
of womankind. His true mark was that scorn of 
the suffering mass, that deification of the merciless 
masters, which he found in the society of all time. 
He saw that the ages have known no other dominant 
type, and that humanity, as it stands to-day under 
the burden of its sorrows, is the tragic result. 

The letter killeth : to take all this at its face value 
is but Sporus breaking his butterfly on the wheel. 
He saw that modern society was perishing of the 
megalomania of individualism, and he produced 
his monster of the Superman, as Rabelais produced 
some of his giants. 

But this is exactly what Germany has done at 
the bidding of the fatuous Brandes, eager to make 
good his claim to the discovery of a new light in 
literature. He has no criterion of judgment but 
the " powerful personality." He might have known 
that Superman is but the exaggeration, in carica- 
ture, of a favourite fancy of the professor at 
whose feet Nietzsche sat as a youth in the lecture 
room. Biirckhardt revelled in his conception of 
the " universal man " of the Renascence, the 
Tyrant and the Condottiere, who, " despite their 
ruthlessness, were men cast in a gigantic mould." 
It was the pupil's protest, not his confession of 
faith. 



186 MY HARVEST 

Bernhardi, with equal ingenuity in missing the 
point, is to Treitschke what Brandes is to Nietzsche. 
He hardly counts in any serious consideration of 
the case. He has degraded the Prussian historians 
to the level of mere quotations for his " trade 
circulars " of war, and is at best but a parasite 
of the regular growths. To be preached to death 
by a dull curate, as well as a wild one, is to suffer 
the superfluous pang. He stands for nothing but 
a pedantic scheme for the subjugation of the 
whole earth, until but one barbaric cry, and that a 
Hoch ! shall be heard over the roofs of the world. 
He is about the only one of them known in this 
country. Yet, with all his imperfections on his 
head, he ought to be " appointed to be read in 
churches," not as an Apocalyptic warning of our 
national fate, but only to bring comfort to the 
citizen in his pew. England, of course, looms 
largely in his plan of campaign. She has long 
since found that those who set themselves to 
break Parliaments are apt to find Parliaments 
able to break them. Even the Prussian historians 
might have told him that those who undertake 
the larger task of breaking England run some risk 
of the same fate. 

To form an idea of the extent to which all this 
has cast its spell over the German mind, we have 
only to turn to a curious manifesto from the 
German theologians, issued in the earlier stages 
of the war. It was addressed to " Evangelical 
Christians Abroad," and was, as the phrase goes, 
most influentially signed by professors, pastors, 
missionaries, evidently, by their official titles, of 



PRUSSIANIZED HISTORY 187 

the highest standing in BerHn, Munich, Halle, 
Hamburg, Gottingen, Frankfort, Leipsig, and 
elsewhere. That nothing might be wanting to give 
it its peculiar character, it came at a time when 
no small part of Belgium was but a landscape of 
burned villages, and thousands of wretched crea- 
tures, who had lost their all, were tramping the 
blood-stained roads on their way beyond sea for a 
roof and a crust. In face of all this, the manifesto 
invited the sympathies of the Evangelical churches 
of Christendom for a German people, whose ideal 
was peaceful work, who desired to thrust none from 
its place, who claimed only " a modest share of 
colonization in the primitive world," and who 
had only drawn the sword " to repel a wanton 
attack," and in defence of its individuality, its 
culture, and its honour. 

The document concluded with passages from 
The Lord's Prayer. 

This far transcends hypocrisy, it comes out 
of the very night of the human mind, the atrophy 
of the human soul, and it will remain for many a 
day the most terrible weapon in the armoury of 
the adversary. From first to last, the cause of 
Germany is implicitly identified with civilization, 
and the latter with " Teutonic Protestantism." 
No wonder that Civilization : Its Cause and Cure 
is one of the most widely read of Edward Carpen- 
ter's works. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 

MY life was still Paris as a place of settlement 
tempered by foreign missions. One of these 
took me to Russia, still the real Asian mystery. 
Scribner^s Magazine, subsequently purchased by The 
Century Company, had made a new departure in 
serial publication, with a life of Peter the Great by 
Eugene Schuyler, United States Consul at Rome. 
There was need of material for illustration : I was 
sent out to collect it, for the benefit of the Russian 
and French artists in Paris who, under my direc- 
tion, were to illustrate the work. 

The conductors of the magazine — Mr. Roswell 
Smith as representing the company, and Dr. 
Holland as Editor, with Richard Watson Gilder 
as the next in command — had determined to make 
art in illustration one of the chief features. They 
took incredible pains about it, and were as lavish 
of money as other commanders are of lives. The 
old wood engraving was to give place to the new 
method of the process which preserves all the 
main features of the original drawing. All en- 
graving is at best only a translation, and too 
often but a paraphrase : the other is verisimilitude, 
in all that makes for " quality " — the strokes of 
the brushwork, the happy accidents of the fever 

188 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 189 

of execution. A graver trying to be careless is 
sometimes but an elephant dancing a hornpipe. 
It was now to be the picture almost as it had come 
from the artist's hand. They imported largely 
from Germany, both for methods and for men. 
They had many ups and downs in the course of 
the heroic venture, but they won at last and 
revolutionized the higher art of illustration in 
our part of the world. 

I took out the proper introductions, and I needed 
them. All official Russia was in the cold fit of 
suspicion and mistrust, the period being that of 
the assassination of the Tsar Liberator Alexander 
II. He had emancipated his serfs on conditions 
that satisfied neither them nor their masters, and, 
like most adventurous reformers, he was sacrificed 
to the principle of all or none. His successor was 
hardly encouraged by the example, and he went 
into gloomy retirement by way of giving himself 
a chance of dying in his bed. The Winter Palace 
was in a state of drawn blinds : the Imperial 
family walked the gardens of Peterhof within a 
ring of sixty thousand bayonets. 

This was unfortunate for me, as I particularly 
wished to see the gallery of the Hermitage, for 
battle pictures or other memorials of Peter. The 
Hermitage is really a private collection of the 
Tsar to which in quiet times the public are ad- 
mitted by imperial favour : it adjoins, and forms 
part of the Palace. How to get in ? The will was 
there, and the way was found by the good offices 
of the charge d'affaires of the United States. I 
had a special permit, and was put under the care 



190 MY HARVEST 

of a military officer, sword at side, but of course 
only because he was in uniform. He naturally 
had his instructions to see all fair to both parties, 
especially the Russian Government. 

I had no reason to complain of him — quite the 
contrary. He was politeness and even court 
politeness itself. Though theoretically my leader, 
he always bowed me in front of him, and never 
asked me to turn right or left without a " will you 
be so exceedingly obliging ? " to preface the 
request. It was quite uplifting, if only you took 
it in the right way, and I managed to do that by 
cherishing the fancy that I was his imperial 
master, attended by an aide-de-camp. In this way 
we mounted the famous staircase of malachite, 
and passed with echoing steps through the magnifi- 
cent galleries decorated in an equally lavish way. 
It was gratifying, but after a little of it I began to 
pity my prototype. Marooned in this paradise of 
beauty, without a kindred soul ! It was the image 
of the awful solitude of his state. The clanking 
sabre of my aide-de-camp — I think there were 
spurs too, for the effect of the minor key — seemed 
quite at cross purposes with the work on the walls. 
Peasant interiors, with dim figures saying grace 
in the light of a farthing dip, to save them from 
too close an inspection of their provender ; Tempta- 
tions of St. Anthony ; a Spanish collection, the 
finest in the world outside of Madrid ; exquisite 
landscapes of all the schools, glowing in the soft 
light of peace, happiness and the beatitudes of the 
spiritual life. How enjoy such things in such a 
void ! Everything was out of keeping : you had 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 191 

to skate from masterpiece to masterpiece over the 
polished floors. 

Art and autocracy must often be at cross pur- 
poses. I had met Count Zichy on the way out, 
in his retirement from the post of painter to the 
Russian Court, and he showed me the drawings 
for his pictures, done under conditions that make 
all modern work " to command " almost invari- 
ably a failure. They were chiefly pencilled sketches 
of costumes, in microscopic detail. He explained 
that the first and last consideration with the 
august sitters was the spiritual import of their 
wearing apparel. They seemed to have a dress 
for every circumstance, every event, every mood 
of their superbly tailored lives. It was their only 
way of expression, consistent with the supreme 
necessity of saving a face in lines of eternal calm. 
One of his last commissions was a picture of the 
arrival at Sebastopol of the remains of the Tsare- 
vitch Nicholas, who had died at Nice, his brother 
succeeding as Alexander III. The tremendously 
solemn import of the ceremony was imperilled at 
every moment, by this sense of the overlordship 
of the outfitter, in the minds of all. Such and such 
chamberlains, admirals, generals, governors of pro- 
vinces were in attendance, each in uniform which 
had to be rendered in its minutest detail of passe- 
menterie, at large, not omitting the bell-ropes in 
gold and silver lace that, on such occasions, dangle 
from the shoulder to the chest. When these were 
right, and not a moment before, the picture was 
passed, but as no official was in charge of the 
simple pathos of the matter, this came very 



192 MY HARVEST 

poorly off. The very buttons had laws of their 
own : " kindly remember, monsieur le peintre, that 
my tunic has double lines of two buttons with 
alternations of three." All this multiplied into 
the several claims of epaulette, sashes, sword- 
knots, trouser stripes twin or single, orders and 
stars ! It was as bad as a wake, with the bier and 
its tenant reduced to a side show. 

It was quite a relief to have to pursue one's 
researches in the Imperial library. Here was a 
librarian who was quite a fellow creature in the 
first place, and an official only in the second. He 
was always helpful, at times somewhat formally 
polite, but beneath all this quite capable of little 
tempers, and of airs of lassitude which showed 
that you had really worn his patience to the quick. 
It was all very well to be conscientious in your 
work, and to ask for this, that and the other almost 
beyond the resources of the printed word, but 
librarians have their feelings, to say nothing of 
their dinner hours. I remember a final outburst 
that brought me to my senses. " It is, as I have 
already had the honour to tell you, Monsieur, 
quite out of our power to answer that question." 
This is the Russian, old and new, the hot temper 
always at hand to help the goodness of heart out 
of a difficulty. The combination of the most 
obsequious civility with the rough edge of some 
original sin not yet worked out of the system was 
particularly refreshing, and it gave me great 
pleasure in his society. It had the charm of 
exploration without the labour of research, like a 
buried city within a hand's breadth of the surface. 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 193 

This, so far as my observation goes, is character- 
istic of the race. Their Western culture is but one 
of their rough coats worn inside out to show a 
silken lining. They are still good fellows, that is 
the main point, and human in their alternations 
of the mood of the moment. I was lucky enough 
to see something of both at their best. 

The old Russian boyar, or noble type, I en- 
countered at Petersburg — I beg its pardon, Petro- 
grad. He had a large estate within the city, and 
I had been referred to him as a person who knew 
all that was worth knowing about the icono- 
graphy of Peter the Great. He might almost have 
had it at first hand from Peter, to judge by the anti- 
quity of his manners and customs. I found him, 
by invitation, at a family dinner, and at the head 
of a long table with covers laid for thirty or so, 
husband and wife, sons and sons' wives and 
children, with a married grandchild here and there 
and his progeny, to make out. It was the patri- 
archal roof tree, as you may still find it in our 
old French colony of Mauritius, the dining-room 
as the baronial hall of the clan. Here, wherever 
they lived in the capital, they were expected to 
assemble on Sundays for the family feast. He 
was quite of the old school, in his long white beard 
of the days when Peter, fresh from his Western 
tour, had to keep barbers at the gates of the cities, 
to bring Asia into line with Europe. His gar- 
ments were in the bunchy style of his primitive 
Russian prints, wrappers without much concern 
about a fit, the outer one half dressing-gown. The 
younger people were as smart as you could wish, 



194 MY HARVEST 

Paris and London at their best. He was hail- 
fellow-well-met, though in a certain stately way, 
and his manners were quite distinguished. It 
would have been impossible, I should say, to take 
a liberty with him without having to smart for it. 
He had a certain noble air as of one used to unques- 
tioning obedience all his life. The children took 
many liberties for all that, while still watching 
him to see how far they could go. So long as he 
merely roared calls to order they had it all their 
own way, but when he named them, they stopped 
at once. 

The style of it all must have come straight down 
for centuries, with hardly a change. To me, as the 
stranger within his gates, he was all high courtesy, 
serious discussion of the purpose of my visit, 
promises of aid, well kept. I don't know how 
far he ranked as a mere survival, I did not see 
enough of the country to judge that, but I fancy 
there were more of his sort than generally meet 
the eye of the tourist. I caught many glimpses 
of men like him in externals, people of the upper 
middle, cuddling huge bed pillows as part of their 
equipment for a railway journey and sometimes 
stores of provender in bags. It is quite conceiv- 
able that he carried his pillow too when he went 
abroad, and laughed at his manicured sons and 
daughters as milksops for being content to find 
all their comforts of home in palace cars. I dare- 
say they laughed back again, though with discre- 
tion, so it suited both parties. This is Russia the 
old and the new, still side by side, and with perfect 
understanding and goodfellowship between them, 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 195 

and no aloofness to mark a sense of the grades. 
It was a pleasant contrast to the free England I 
had left behind. 

After dinner we went into the grounds where, 
as it was yet winter, a huge montagne Russe was 
reared for the slides. It was the well-known 
Russian variety of the toboggan. You mount to 
the top of a wooden tower, throw yourself into 
a sled and then career at railway speed down a 
gully of dark gleaming ice, banked on either side 
with snow, to reach a level where the loss of the 
impetus gradually slows you down to a standstill. 
Then up again and da capo till you have had your 
fill. It is a desperate business for a beginner, 
but I was silly enough to try it, even with a 
moujik for driver. He got me down all right, but 
I don't care to say what became of my topper hat 
and my dignity. 

This interior may be contrasted with another of 
a Russian salon of the new generation. And still 
it was of the old one, for whenever I think of it 
I am reminded of the salon of Tolstoy's War and 
Peace. The conversation was still mainly in 
French, the figures, but for the fashions of the day, 
were the same, governing ring, military, leaders of 
society. The talk was politics, scandal, rumours 
of wars, the joys of life reduced by successive 
cultures to the needs of fastidious souls. The 
common topic, with which you were always safe, 
was the latest dancer at the opera. It was the 
Russia of the reaction against popular liberties, 
the white terror over again, and avenging itself 
on the red. This was my only glimpse of a society 



196 MY HARVEST 

of that kind, and I freely own that I felt afraid of 
it as something both decadent and unreal. All 
were but playing a part, in their smooth-spoken 
cynicism, their thick lacquer of polish, their almost 
utter want of all fervour of conviction, where con- 
viction of a kind must still have had its place. 
Their talk on literature, however, was penetrating 
and good : they launched the phrase as happily 
as their forerunners of France, for with their subtle 
intelligence this was the charm they most readily 
caught. But these are not governing qualities in 
our hurly-burly of a world, still awaiting its 
finishing touches as a human settlement. One 
could not help thinking of their balance of fellow 
countrymen, some hundred and sixty millions 
strong, and wondering how long it would last as a 
thing sufficient to racial and national needs. 
Minorities always rule, of course, but they must 
be strong ones. With all their fine talk, fine 
manners, these good folk seemed to take high 
politics as some of us nearer home take the game 
of bridge. The women were the worst offenders 
in their passion for social form. I leave it as an 
impression for what it is worth, without attempting 
to explain or defend. 

Certainly the aptitude of Russians for learning 
things is marvellous — a natural quickness. I knew 
of one who had four languages, besides her own, 
at her tongue's end — English, French, German, 
Italian. She spoke in them and wrote in them. 
And she had something to write about, a basis of 
solid studies in history, literature and the com- 
merce of life. She thought in them, wrongly 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 197 

enough sometimes, as I thought, in my turn, 
but that was merely matter of opinion. The 
thesis was there coherent and four square, with 
the power to hold her own in it. She was obsessed 
with the idea of a superior cast of mind to which 
she and her intellectual set belonged. With all 
this she was a most accomplished musician, and 
had filled the Queen's Hall more than once for 
concerts given in her own name. I have a certain 
hesitation in saying all this, because it may seem 
founded on mere recollections of my reading in 
prodigies of the past, our own Admirable Crichton 
or the continental Pico della Mirandola. As a lad, 
Crichton is said to have known a dozen languages : 
I wonder in how many of them he could have 
deceived the native. Gilbert Hamerton used to 
say that no more than two can ever be acquired 
in that perfection. The peculiarity in this lady's 
case as a Russian, was that she was one of many, 
only less richly endowed. And I hasten to add, 
still with the purpose of saving myself, that the 
union of qualities precluded the marked bias for 
one, that makes for success. Nothing in particular 
seemed worth doing, because all seemed so easy to 
do. The sense of this limitation helped to kill Marie 
Bashkirsteff. Distinction seemed ever to elude 
her, till she won it at last by the sheer frankness 
of her confession of failure. But she was not there 
to enjoy it when it came. " What shadows we 
are " — every aspiring soul should be able to finish 
the quotation. 

The classic case, I think, in our British experience 
is Madame de Novikoff. It was a real part well 



198 MY HARVEST 

played : there was a moment, fleeting as even 
historic moments are, when she figured as a sort 
of supplementary ambassador. She knew all our 
great people as a friend and intimate. She wrote 
freely to The Times with Holy Russia and " our 
Tsar " for subjects ; and she had huge store of 
postcards, to say nothing of letters still unpublish- 
able, to show how heartily a Prime Minister of 
England entered into the fun of the game. Her 
day passed, for a meteoric appearance like that 
cannot possibly become an institution, but while 
it lasted it was enough to make her one of the 
women of the time. She seemed rather out of place 
in England, where every fine-drawn scheme is apt 
to be upset by a chilly blast of popular feeling. 
Yet she has lived to see a Russian Alliance for all 
that. 

I was so lucky as to find Turguenieff at Petersburg, 
and to obtain access to him through a friend. Him 
I have always regarded as one of the first rates, 
because he did so much to reveal his native Russia 
to the Western world. I called on him one Sunday 
morning and found him with two or three friends. 
There was no mystery in their meeting, yet to 
me it had quite the air of a gathering of initiates 
of a forbidden faith — say Nicodemus taking his 
first course. When I strolled from there into the 
neighbouring cathedral, with its worshippers pros- 
trate on the marble floor, I saw that this fancy 
was merely an atmospheric effect. 

He received me most kindly, and showed 
interest in the work on which I was engaged, but 
was sparing in his references to things Russian, 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 199 

as though he felt that he was on the wrong side of 
the frontier for that. What he thought of his 
native land and of its political and social life was 
in his works, for all who knew how to find his 
meaning. He lived abroad, but as the interpreter 
of Russia to herself and to the foreigner, it was 
not to his interest to deprive himself of all chance 
of occasional contact with the living text. Verest- 
chagin used occasionally to scoff at him as wanting 
in pluck, but the great writer knew what he was 
about, and his was by far the finer mind. 

The Parisian circle of his acquaintance was at 
once large and select. He mastered all that 
France had to teach him in literature, and, while 
equal to her best, as a craftsman of philosophic 
fiction, he had a just sense of their lack of contact 
at first hand with the deeper tragedy of life. When 
this secret came out in posthumous indiscretions, 
based on his diaries and letters, it was a little dis- 
concerting to find that he had no great opinion of 
Alphonse Daudet, but, as you got used to it, easy 
to bear. It agreed with thoughts that had flitted 
through one's own mind, without being asked to 
stay, for lack of courage. The French writer was 
a little too manifestly anxious to please : urbanity 
has its price. The Lettres de Mon Moulin, where- 
with he bounded into public notice, are a trifle 
insipid on a second reading, as being too much 
about all the certificated nice things nicely said. 
Octave Feuillet, as we have already seen, was the 
arch offender in this way, with his eternal theme 
of the hero as prig. Daudet was naturally upset 
by his friend's frankness, and he wrote bitter 



200 MY HARVEST 

things about hospitality violated, by a not too 
amiable Russian from the Steppe^ which were much 
beside the mark. 

Gorki, a writer of the same serious sense of the 
calling as his compatriot, came my way years 
after, and in a rather curious manner. One day, 
as he was passing through England to take up 
his long residence in the milder climate of Italy, 
I received an invitation to meet him at dinner at 
the chambers of Mr. Hagberg Wright. A dozen or 
so were at the board, among them Nevinson and 
Bernard Shaw. It could hardly be called a sociable 
gathering, for the guest of the evening had no 
language but his own, and most of the others were 
without Russian. Our felicitations therefore had 
first to be offered in English or French, and then 
turned into his mother tongue by the lady who 
accompanied him — with the process reversed, of 
course, for his acknowledgments. It became as 
tedious as an extradition case in the unknown 
tongue. He said something amiable to me about 
my work, and I could not help asking him how 
he came to know anything about it. "I have read 
it in translation," he said. I pricked up my ears : 
no application for leave had reached me from that 
quarter. As I afterwards learned, it was not 
required. The piracy was still a compliment of a 
kind, and I left it at that, no doubt to the perfect 
satisfaction of all concerned. 

Naples set him up again — his lungs were in a 
very weak state. I hope he has suffered no relapse, 
by his patriotic offer to take his place in the ranks 
for the war of 1914, There was a twofold risk. 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 201 

For a long time he found his native air a less 
dangerous adversary than his native Government. 
His first attempt to repatriate himself ended in a 
precipitate flight back to the south. Russia will 
have to find a better way of using men like that 
than to put truth-telling into her penal code. 
There are signs that the present struggle of nations 
and races may lead her to mend her ways. The 
offer to Poland gives ground for hope, but no 
more can be said, while Finland still mourns the 
loss of her chartered liberties. If all is to be, even 
second best in the world — and Pangloss himself 
would now hardly put in his claim for more — 
democracy must be allowed to try her hand. 
Everything else has been tried, and see where we 
are to-day ! with the only light in the sky focussed 
on the shining armour of the war lord, on his 
knees to the United States for a smile. 

Tolstoy has left a literature for the masses more 
stupendous in conception and execution than even 
all his earlier work. It is little read outside of 
Russia, but its regenerating power for the spirit 
of man is simply incalculable. As a miracle of 
mere technic it stands alone, with this giant of 
intellect and heart making himself again, in his old 
age, as a little child, to bring the highest thought 
to the humblest minds. 

It is curious to study ideals and usages as they 
actually function to make the whole world kin. 
The community of great ideas is of course the 
finest example, especially the community of the 
emotions. But these still have different springs 
according to the latitude and longitude, and 



202 MY HARVEST 

besides you have to know a people well to discover 
what is really astir in their souls. Meanwhile 
mere superficial manners and customs may some- 
times give a clue of a kind. The very fashions are 
not to be despised. You may now travel all across 
Europe and Asia, and find traces of the reigning 
hat, male or female, of the Boulevard. I know it 
is so in Europe and I hazard the rest on trust. It 
is the same with the amusements, especially those 
of the grosser sort. The music-hall — one rather 
takes shame to say it — is a bond of union to-day. 
If I had been prepared with that reflection in time, 
it would have saved me a shock at the sight of a 
lion comique at Petersburg. There he was in a close 
imitation of the make-up of his prototype. The 
Great Vance, then our star above the horizon. It 
was faultless as to evening-dress and crush hat, 
not forgetting the button-hole. The " swell " of 
popular vision was the thing aimed at in each case. 
The racial differentiation came in with the artist's 
reading of his part. The Briton idealized in mere 
jolly-dogism, spreeing in floods of champagne, and 
' to-morrow we'll get sober.' The Russian did 
better than that. His little song had the national 
nitchevo — for its burden, but in this case only as a 
mere devil-may-care, for the want of something 
to care about on your own account. Quite freely 
rendered, it might have stood for ' what's the 
use ? ' — a deeper strain, I thought, than ours. 

There it is — the deeper strain of thought and 
feeling ! Our current criticism is beginning to 
be better informed as to the real and effective 
Russian fiction of our time : Turguenieff, Dostoieffsky 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 203 

and Gogol are now, it seems, to Russians, but 
as Jane Austen, Dickens, and Fielding are to 
us. One makes acquaintance with strange names 
such as Chekhof, Kouprin, Andreef, Sologub, and 
a host of others, as with the names of new stars 
in the firmament. All stand for the short story ; 
the classic three-decker or so of the earlier Tolstoy 
model is not dead, but it is out of vogue. The new 
men say their say in fifty pages and still contrive 
to omit nothing that counts. Chekhof the optimist 
— a rare bird in that quarter — can, we are told, 
make a story out of three sentences and an inter- 
rogation mark — perhaps, after all, only to prove 
that it is possible to make too little of a good 
thing. Most of them, I regret to say, I can as yet 
but hope to read, if only for profitable nightmares. 
My next stage was Moscow, for special research 
in the archives of the Kremlin. The harvest was 
a little too rich for the flying visitor. Pictured 
costumes of every period, especially of course of 
the time when Peter began to take matters in 
hand. Rude merrymakings and drinking bouts, 
great battle pieces with the armies drawn up to 
fit the squares of a sort of chessboard that stood 
for the field, with infantry lost, as it were, in the 
pine forests of their own spears towering to the 
sky, rectangular cavalry and artillery on the same 
plan. It was the formation of the time and it 
served to disconcert Turk and Swede, among the 
bonniest fighters in history. Perhaps the Scots' 
soldier of fortune in Peter's service had brought 
the pikes oversea. They saved the little there was 
to save at Flodden and won Bannockburn. 



204 MY HARVEST 

Then of course there was the Kremhn, the forti- 
fied city within the city, white stoned and still 
looking as new as when it rose from its ashes after 
the burning. Within, a bunch of little churches 
and official buildings, some with the dignity of 
shrines, all close together like things packed in a 
box. Even the great coronation church is but a 
chapel of ease beside Westminster Abbey, or the 
cathedral of Rheims — what is left of this now ! 
One, and that the most perfect gem of orthodox 
art, is almost too small for use. You make the 
round of it in a jiffy, and go from turret to turret 
by passages in which there is hardly room for 
two abreast. Kneel in some of the shrines if you 
can, when two or three are gathered together : 
like most buildings public or private in Russia 
they are stuffy to the last degree. The idea seems 
to be — keep out the cold by keeping out the fresh 
air, and warming up the stale with everlasting 
fires. A mouthful of it is something to bite. The 
smell of incense in possession is often as old as the 
buildings. The Tsar sniffs the ages as he sits on 
his coronation throne. The jewelled ikons suggest 
untapped sources of wealth : the Russian Church 
has levied tribute of this sort for centuries. At the 
Troitska monastery, according to the legend, the 
cellars are full of precious stones : a new Aladdin 
would only have to broach the casks in which they 
are stored. 

And all I still had to miss ! for want of time, 
opportunity, knowledge — Moscow winning its way 
back to true metropolitan rank as the centre of the 
Panslavist movement and of the Panslavist faith. 



THE REAL ASIAN MYSTERY 205 

I returned to Paris only to find that I should 
soon have to set out once more. Schuyler was 
getting behindhand with his copy for the serial 
issue, and wanted a clerical lift. This took me 
and my amanuensis to Rome in the depth of 
winter. We dug him out of a mass of proof, or of 
notes awaiting the shorthand writer, and saved 
the situation, but it was a close thing. At the 
farewell luncheon, he led me into his study 
for coffee and cigarettes, and for the welcome 
warmth of my first charcoal fire. I reached the 
station almost in a state of collapse : the fumes 
had poisoned me. However, I managed to stagger 
to the train, and to sleep it off in nightmare visions 
before the journey's end. 



CHAPTER XV 
AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 

I SAW America for the first time in 1876. It 
was the year of the great exhibition to cele- 
brate the centennial of Independence, and Phila- 
delphia sent out her cards for company to the 
human race. Another visit followed a year or 
two later, my last at this time of writing. I had 
glimpses of other cities, as a matter of course, 
but I never got further west than Chicago. It 
was my loss, but in the same circumstances of 
limited time and opportunity I should have to 
suffer the same misfortune. 

My first impression was how like England it is ; 
ancient ways, sturdy British types and ideals — 
with a new departure in hospitality on trust with- 
out waiting a lifetime to make your acquaintance : 
even a refreshing absence of 'cuteness, at any rate 
near the surface, the only thing I touched. This 
was mainly a fancy, for I daresay I found what 
I came to seek. It was still the America of my 
boyish acquaintance with the literature — memories 
of Washington Irving as a classic, in new elegant 
extracts of the time ; of Fenimore Cooper, as a 
delightful variant of Scott, and of his noble savage 
of the hills, touching civilization as with tongs. 
Add to these, from keepsakes and the like, memories 

206 



AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 207 

of Mrs. Sigourney, the travelling American inter- 
preter of the 'forties, between the old land and 
the new, and of Peter Parley who, in a single 
sentence of his travels — " the streets of Paris are 
narrow, and often very dirty," still serves to carry 
one back to the days before the Flood. At any rate 
to those before Monsieur Haussmann, with Balzac 
looking on. 

In the higher sphere of my later reading it was 
much the same. Longfellow's New England was 
but the old one, in inspiration. Bryant derived 
from Spenser, and by a kind of condescension in a 
man of his genius, from Kirke White and Blair. 
Holmes and Lowell, and even the august Haw- 
thorne, still struck our native note. Others, 
defiant of this easy classification, were Emerson — 
I think the most abiding influence on my life — 
Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry James. As 
for Emerson, I have always felt that, when he 
went to see Carlyle, the etiquette of kings required 
an immediate return of the visit. 

All this was confirmed, as to tendencies, by 
later contact with American settlers in Paris. 
The colony of the demi-millionaires who had made 
their fortunes in trade — the half — of that earlier 
age, being as good as the whole of ours for the 
dreams of avarice. The colony of the diplomats, 
absolutely new to the business, who had found their 
harvest in the spoils of the vanquished, combined 
perhaps with services in the Civil War, and who 
made up for lack of training with the help of the 
permanent secretary and mother wit. As often 
as not, these had started in real estate, or in The 



208 MY HARVEST 

Balm of a Thousand Flowers. In exceptional cases 
their grandes dames were at times too exclusively 
based on recollections of Ouida. One I knew 
never spoke to a servant whether for praise or 
blame, but signified her wishes by signs, and had 
her rooms carpeted in double pile for the effect of 
ineffable repose. Ask me what was the common 
note, and I should have to say that they were all 
bland, equally the virtue of a good salad and of 
a good soul. 

Then the colony of the artists, who carried on 
the tradition of Couture, and sold at good prices, 
and rode their nag in the Bois — all heedless, for 
the moment, of the youngsters, like Sargent, who 
were so soon to throw them out of their stride. I 
knew of one such, majestic in his sorrows, whose cry 
was " Oh ye gods and little teapots ! V existence n'est 
qu'un lourd fardeau,^^ as he declined in his old age 
to fancy portraits of ancestors at so much a foot, 
to boil the pot for the day. 

So of course when I landed I found all my 
automata in waiting. The man of colour was 
rather a novelty, especially when I saw him on the 
box seat of the family coach, and wanting every 
inch of it as he rolled comfortably from side to 
side. Yet what was that, after all, but a bit of the 
* Ole Virginny ' of my dreams, with St. Clair of 
Uncle Tom in his chariot of state. 

What a gulf, what an abysm of time between all 
this and the America of to-day, alive at all points, 
and in the van of every new movement if she dies 
for it ! So much has happened between then and 
now— to give us Mrs. Wharton, for instance, as 



AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 209 

the successor of Mrs. Sigourney, and Mr. Henry- 
James as the successor of himself. I remember 
him so well at the period of change, when Daisy 
Miller was still in the freshness of her first youth, 
and he paced the beach at fitretat — in the crowd 
but not of it — as he meditated new and wondrous 
departures in the metaphysics of his craft. His 
early work was not wicked enough for some of 
the rising school, vaguely conscious of a want they 
could hardly express, and, if asked to try, calling 
him a Massachusetts Sir Galahad. 

The new school, the new departures into the 
literature of life, manners, breadth of outlook, all 
that tends to make literature vital, directly 
resulted from the grant of copyright to the old 
country. Fair terms for the English writer, who 
could no longer be pirated, proved to be still fairer 
for the American, who, with infinitely more to 
say for American readers, found no paying market 
for his work while his rival's could be had for 
nothing. With that new encouragement, he set 
forth on a second discovery of his own continent, 
in character, adventure, local colour, and spiritual 
type that is in full course to-day. 

My most interesting discovery in America was 
W.H.H. — we never called him anything else. He 
was my editor at the New York World, but of 
course, while there were three thousand miles of 
sea between us, hardly a thing of flesh and blood 
to me. We met as soon as I reached New York. 
I called by appointment at his chambers in, I think, 
the University Building, though no longer put to 
University uses, and the best thing I had seen in 



210 MY HARVEST 

a kind of cloistral seclusion on that side of the great 
deep. I was shown into a spacious room adorned 
with bronzes and pictures, all of them good, and 
some by masters. The books in several languages 
were of the same quality. I remember the bright- 
ness of the morning, the light making a clear cut 
of the shade, and falling on a small water-melon 
which I suppose was to be his appetiser for break- 
fast. All was in keeping of style, say, with a 
Hogarthian interior, including the black boy who 
had ushered me in. And then the great man fresh 
from his bath, and with the exception of his silken 
dressing-gown, another eighteenth-century touch, 
quite ready for company. The tall figure had 
passed the turning-point of middle age, yet there 
was still plenty of life in his smile, and particularly 
in his wonderfully bright eyes. 

His talk contributed to the impression of some- 
thing out of the past. It was deliberately good as 
talk, though rather too much in the modern note 
of social brag. In a quarter of an hour he had 
managed to show that he knew everybody worth 
knowing in both hemispheres. It was evident 
that most of the European capitals were, as Mrs. 
Gamp said in another connexion, as print to him. 
I believe her reference was to the wickedness of 
the age, but it might have stood all the same. 

He had taken over the New York World long 
before Mr. Pulitzer came upon the scene. I believe 
he was backed by Mr. Tilden. His idea was to 
make it a model of good writing, and he was able 
to do that. He was master of the ' civil leer ' of 
Pope's AtticuSf and it was his pride to kill with a 



AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 211 

touch. He collected a brilliant staff, not all of his 
way of thinking in politics, but with literary finish 
as their bond of union with the chief. William 
Brownell, subsequently the author of the finest 
and most searching study of French life, art and 
character of our time, was one of them, Montgomery 
Schuyler was another. There was touch in even 
the reports of fires. They slew De Witt Talmage 
every week. As he preached on Sunday in full 
vigour of rhetoric, they left him at his last gasp 
in Monday's issue — of course only to offer them 
just as good a target for that day week. Their 
esprit de corps was astonishing — it was a glorious 
attribute of their youth : they felt a stain on their 
professional smartness like a wound. One of them 
who as City Editor had missed an item, peached 
on himself, and offered his resignation on the spot. 
Their editor, as a travelled man, took sole charge 
of the social scene of the whole planet. He went 
constantly to Europe for fresh impressions, and 
to pick up important people who were not on his 
list. Even the mystical Laurence Oliphant, of that 
forgotten masterpiece of fiction Piccadilly, was 
under his spell, and bowed his proud head to the 
interviewer. The only other with whom our leader 
shared that kind of mastery was Lake Harris, the 
arch mystic of some American phalanstery. His 
orders, transmitted by spiritual wireless across 
oceans and continents, brought Oliphant to heel in 
a moment, wherever he might be. Piccadilly comes 
to a close in that way. The master's call from 
distant America finds the disciple in that compass 
point of British fashion which gives its title to the 



212 MY HARVEST 

book, and he starts at once. In the long run, 
unfortunately, he went once too often, taking his 
family in tow, with direful results to the integrity 
of their fortunes, and of their souls. It was a 
tribute to the powers of W.H.H. that he was able 
to make a part for himself against a pontiff of that 
sort. 

Much more about him came to me afterwards 
in the talk of the time. There was a sort of syn- 
thesis of W.H.H. in the clubs and the drawing- 
rooms. People smiled when he was named, yet 
took care to right themselves by saying — " O, 
he's a card ! " I learned that he was a duplicate 
of Aaron Burr in regard to his extraordinary 
influence over women. He could make them 
believe what he liked about himself, on the one 
hand, about his enemies on the other. He was 
sympathetic, unscrupulous, fascinating, merciless — 
according to the needs of the situation. Here and 
there, in the retirement of lodgings in a German 
spa, you might find one who was expiating him as 
an offence for which there was no hope of pardon, 
and hardly any desire. He had made her talked 
about, and she had fled there to music, art and 
memories to make the best of a broken life. Another, 
still in the haunts of men, carried his portrait in 
the innermost recess of a double locket, on a fatuous 
estimate of herself as the only she. He had the 
spell. Where he was not known he could have 
little doubt of the result. Where he was, he fell 
back on his power of suggestion, and got himself 
accepted as the lost one who had found his minister- 
ing angel. This had its risks for the ministrant. 



AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 213 

Vigny's Eloa, we remember, in trying to raise a 
demon up to heaven succeeds only in bringing an 
angel down to the pit. 

In this line his reputation was of old date. As 
far back as the Civil War, Winthrop, one of its 
victims, had written a novel round him, Cecil 
Dreeme, a classic of its time. Nobody, I suppose, 
reads it now. He figured there as the arch villain 
of a sombre piece. The date of the story is now 
almost remote enough to carry him into legend. 
But in current talk strange tales were told of his 
early life at a theological college, where he preached 
the most edifying trial sermons, and wrote hymns, 
one of which still retains its place in the collections. 

For many, even of his detractors, he was another 
biggest thing in creation. It was prodigy at least, 
and he had the additional attraction of being on 
the higher social plane. In this way they found 
a use for him as a link between decadent Europe, 
and a still Puritan America not unwilling to toy 
with the follies of the age. He became a sort of 
introducer of celebrities for the dinner parties of 
Fifth Avenue. Was it a duke, W.H.H. had met him 
on his native heath ; was it a poet or a sage — he 
had capped verses with him, or axioms of worldly 
wisdom, under foreign skies. On one of these occa- 
sions I found him chatting the high life of both 
spheres in French, Spanish, Italian — one down 
t'other come on, with a brio that fascinated the 
whole circle. It was Alcibiades playing off a rugged 
old Spartan ephor against a satrap of the great 
king, each without a particle of faith in him, but 
captive to his charm. 



214 MY HARVEST 

Then came the last act of the piece. Tired of 
these facile triumphs, and perhaps aware of the 
approaches of old age, he married, and cleared 
out for the final conquest of London. Here his 
part was that of the interpreter of America to 
England, the warm friend and admirer of the 
latter, but only as one who had nothing at heart 
but the good of both. It was the time of the great 
divide on the question of Home Rule. The 
Unionists, whether Liberal or Conservative, wanted 
arguments against the hated measure that should 
bear the stamp of the just man made perfect by 
his freedom from national prejudice and party tics. 
He was soon ready for them with a beautiful book 
on the subject, which captured society in the mass, 
and opened to him every drawing-room of the 
sacred mile. It was written rather in sorrow 
than in anger. It chid the clannish spirit of the 
Irish in the States. It predicted danger to the 
sacred fabric of the British Constitution in a new 
Tammany of imperial scope. The Unionist 
reviewers were in raptures over it as the ripe 
fruit of the wisdom of the ages. It promised to 
root him for ever in the generous soil of Mayfair. 

And then, suddenly, a bolt from the blue : 
his name in other columns of the papers — as 
defendant in a suit of breach of promise of the 
most sordid caste. The plaintiff a third - rate 
actress, if so much as that — Nobody versus the 
Darling of the gods — Nobody, picked up in a 
London omnibus, and but ' the other day ' of 
the date of the action, while his recently assumed 
crown of a well-spent life was still rather a tight 



AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 215 

fit. What a trial it was ! days — weeks of it, as 
recollection serves. Reams of criminating letters 
— either in his handwriting or in that of the enemy 
of mankind, said the experts. The plaintiff sticking 
to her story of at least a desperate flirtation, with 
the promise of marriage ; the defendant laying his 
hand on his heart and declaring that he had never 
seen or exchanged a word with her in the whole 
course of his life. Then, the offer of an hypothesis, 
in the nature of happy second thoughts on his 
side, that might possibly clear up the whole 
mystery. Years before, he had a private secretary, 
one Wilfrid Murray, now lost in space, who wrote 
exactly the same hand as himself : could he be 
the Simon Pure of this strange delusion ? Cries 
for the production of the secretary on the part of 
the public ; and, on that of the defendant, lavish 
advertisements offering rewards for the discovery. 
Finally, sensational appearance of the lawful wife 
in the witness box to testify that her belief in her 
husband's honour was unimpaired. On this he 
won his case. The jury found that, whoever wrote 
the letters, they carried no promise of marriage, 
and there was no more to be said. 

But there was still something to be done, and 
that was the impounding of the letters at the 
instance of the Public Prosecutor, with a view 
to making them the foundation of a charge of 
perjury against a person as yet unnamed. On 
that, the sudden departure from England of the 
hero of the piece, his ostensible motive the search 
for Wilfrid Murray throughout the universe. Pie 
never came within the jurisdiction again. No 



216 MY HARVEST 

long time after, appeared a letter from the devoted 
wife to say that he had died in her arms by the 
borders of one of the Italian lakes, and to call 
down public odium on the wretches who had 
hounded an innocent man to his ruin. It was a 
fourth act that amply fulfilled the promise of the 
others ; and of how few dramas on the stage, or 
of real life, can you say as much as that ? 

So if I am ever to see the States again it will 
be as a new Rip Van Winkle, richly freighted 
with memories of their own past. Need I say 
more than that I remember horse omnibuses in 
Broadway, with the fare poked through a hole in 
the roof, and The Tribune building as the supple- 
mentary wonder of the world. 

And if, with that, one had the same power of 
forecasting their future ! All one can do at present 
in that way is to note portents and signs. I have 
already noted some of them in the literature : I 
return to that. The fiction is no longer mainly 
British in subject, and where it sometimes is so, 
it is still not British in treatment and in the point 
of view. From Cable, from Mark Twain, from 
Bret Harte, down to the author of Mrs. Wiggs 
and the Cabbage Patch, the themes are nearly all 
American. And in many instances the treatment 
is absolutely American too. Mark Twain's humour 
is not in the least the humour of Swift, or of 
Rabelais ; it is an American product. Mr. Dooley 
too is of the soil. It would be impossible to imagine 
anything more purely American, anything less 
indebted to observation, literary or otherwise, of 
any foreign model than the work of Joel Chandler 



AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 217 

Harris. He has put a new type into literature, 
new, right down to its very roots, that will stand 
by itself for ever. 

Then in criticism, the influences are mainly 
French. Not only is there a warm welcome 
given to writers like Bourget and Rod, but native 
writers of the standard of Brownell are French, 
or nothing, in their point of view. 

The most striking example of the non-English 
strain is to be found in the series of Hibbert 
lectures, originally delivered by Professor William 
James in Edinburgh. He enlarged the bounds 
of psychology in a way to make the Scotch meta- 
physical writers turn in their graves. He brought 
into the study of processes of mind and spirit 
influences hitherto kept completely outside of it, 
telepathy and spooks among the number. As to 
the University teaching, once mainly British in 
its structural lines, the revolt against that began 
as far back as Emerson, who refused to take his 
Bachelor's degree because it was not worth the 
five dollars fee. 

The capital fact of my observation of Americans 
as a body politic is their determination to prove 
all things for themselves, alike in good and ill, 
like the child playing at the fireside. It is the 
first real example in history, I think, in spite of the 
Greeks. Tammany is, or was, but the common 
man wishing he could get the same chance ; and 
when he found it would not be worth having, 
harking back, like another child of Israel, to the 
moral law. I wonder if there is any other way of 
educating ninety millions of people. 



218 MY HARVEST 

I toy with this fancy in one of my books. The 
world has never seen the Hke of the new experi- 
ment. Ninety milHons all brought up to do as 
they like, in a very riot of opportunity, and just 
as free to go to the place unmentionable to ears 
polite, as to satisfy their yearnings for better 
society. The old countries know nothing of the 
temptation. They are still in the leading strings 
of superior guidance, and content to regard a 
thousand years as but a day of their pilgrimage. 
The ninety in close quarters would be bad enough, 
but think of the same in a limitless paradise of 
climate, soil, wealth, actual and potential, beyond 
all calculations whatsoever. 

It is a sheer delirium of the will, a second Renas- 
cence of the evil, as well as the good. Their bosses 
the most bloody, bold and resolute of their order 
in all history — colossal exaggerations of Jonathan 
Wild the Great ; their very train robbers, Turpins 
of a larger mould ; their gangs of corruption, the 
most ingenious and all-pervading ; their proletariat, 
with Judge Lynch at their head, the most fierce, 
pitiless and revengeful. A case of absolutes all 
round, happily in the finer things as well ; and 
with all this, a democracy on its way to the light 
with no control worth talking of from priest, ruler, 
or Old Man of the Sea. They have accepted the 
theory of the good and the evil principle in per- 
petual tussle, and small wonder that some of 
them, by way of proving all things, are quite 
disposed to give each a fair trial. They may still 
be wrong, but it is certainly not for Nature to cast 
the first stone. She sets such queer examples. 



AMERICA IN FACT AND FANCY 219 

Is not her whole scheme a war of elements ? her 
fire and water never meeting but to hiss their 
mutual hate. 

They will be first to reach the light, I think, 
but of course there is a possibility of other fortunes, 
which at times sends a cold shiver through one's 
frame. They must win. Democracy has to vindi- 
cate itself against Kaiserdom, or what will become 
of us all ; and of the hosts ultimately marshalled 
for that effort they will stand in the van. 

Another fancy, this of pure speculation, will keep 
me in delicious uncertainty for ever. Mr. Zangwill 
and others have shown us that America is the 
melting - pot of the races — what will the final 
product be ? They will have to be poured into 
some sort of mould to cool off — how will they 
come out ? And, once again as I have said else- 
where, the real American man, especially as the 
future will know him, is not yet born. The ninety 
millions soon to be so many more, from all the 
most pushing peoples on the planet, in their most 
pushing examples, have yet to settle down into a 
type. What a process in racial chemistry ! who 
shall forecast the result ? He will certainly not 
be English any more than the Englishman of 
to-day is Saxon, Norman, or Dane. At best, 
it can only be English as a blend of other first- 
class stocks that will be a new fact of creation. 
I figure him in my fancies as one with the alertness 
and brilliancy of one race, the passion for justice, 
principle, rectitude of another, and, again, with 
this Puritan cast tempered in its rigidity by the 
fire of his sense of life. Another influence still 



220 MY HARVEST 

veins him like marble with an innate courtesy 
and a fantastic honour, another still with a 
thoroughness that lets nothing pass without 
examination, not even a joke. With this again, 
as Nature's own secret in the combination, the 
emotion of colour, the sense of pulsation that 
make for art, poesy — beauty, in a word, as the 
true business. And then, again " dogged " as a 
solid foundation in the concrete of character to 
keep all in its place, and to remind him in moments 
of reverie of great-grandpapa. 

There are still risks of a far different result — 
one of them perhaps that the melting-pot seems 
to grow more exclusive every day. 

But patience, patience, with hope and faith. It 
is no easy matter this making of one more leading 
stock, the rarest thing in all the history of man. 
The number has never yet run into two figures or 
anything like it, for thousands and tens of thou- 
sands of years usually go to any operation of that 
kind. Still we move faster now. Hitherto the 
Life Force, as it now prefers to be called, has been 
in no more hurry about it than the Chinese are 
with the making of the clay for their pots of price. 
It is first get the right clay, then bury it for a 
century or so to mature, then — and this only for 
the first stage. Americans of course would like 
to have all ready for next Fall. 



CHAPTER XVI 

FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 

FRANCE was now in rapid recovery after the 
war. Such changes are among the standing 
miracles of history. You see a state, wellnigh at 
its last gasp — devastated cities, ruined railways 
and bridges, trade and industry at a standstill ; 
and then, almost with the ink yet wet on the 
treaty of peace, a sudden spring back to life and 
work. It is easily explained. Creation is still the 
dominant impulse of the race, destruction takes 
but a second place. Only thousands destroy, but 
millions to their full count of the population are 
interested in the labours of restoration. By an 
irresistible law everyone flies to his store, often 
from secret hoards, to stock the shop and the 
market. Adam delves again. Eve spins, the 
children find their way to the schoolhouse. Every 
insect of the swarm brings his mite to the reef, 
till the magician's wand sinks to the level of a 
bauble of pantomime. 

The new France came into being under conflict 
of course, but of conflict within the bounds of law. 
Should it be the old monarchical France in a fresh 
lease of life, or the France of the revolution, 
tempered by experience and by suffering into 
common sense ? We know which system won, 

221 



222 MY HARVEST 

and which has proved the most stable of all the 
French systems of a century. 

Gambetta struck for that side, and as its leader. 
It was a matter of will and of temperament, quite 
as much as of intellectual pre-eminence. He was 
a second Bismarck in that way — a strong animal 
nature, a bull of Bashan of politics. He ate well, 
drank well, had Rabelais for his bedside book. 
By nature a governing man, he took on the airs 
of state as one to the manner born. To get access 
to him, you had to " make antechamber " as 
in the palaces of kings. A venerable personage, 
who wanted only a staff to complete his equip- 
ment, ranged the suitors for place or preferment, 
according rather to their importance than to the 
order of their coming. Sleek young fellows of good 
standing, on the look out for prefectures, were 
of the number. The influences were entirely 
avowable from first to last, but of course devotion 
to the republic was the supreme test. The French 
do all things methodically : these aspirants had a 
good understanding among themselves to prevent 
them from getting in each other's way. All this 
was arranged in a club to which they belonged — 
a club of place-hunters, it might have been called, 
though in no disparaging sense — where they sipped 
light refreshments and contrived to make their 
own destinies harmonize with those of their country. 
So I once found them engaged, on a visit to the 
institution under the guidance of a friend. 

The great man, I believe, had the same hearty 
welcome for one and all of us. It was certainly 
so in my own case, and naturally, for I wanted 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 223 

nothing of him but information for my papers. 
When all were dismissed for the day, you might 
meet him in the Champs Elysees on his way to 
dinner with the elder Coquelin, the actor, his 
great chum. He leaned heavily on his friend's 
arm, for he was premature in his heaviness of 
age. Hats were raised as they passed, sometimes 
in payment of a double debt of homage to both, 
though Coquelin of course had the tact never to 
raise his in return. 

Jules Simon, another member of the governing 
group, lacked this natural bonhomie of his chief, 
and suffered for it in his standing with the crowd. 
He was a man of the study, a man of books, and as 
such the right one in the right place, as the great 
organizer of popular education. I saw traces of his 
handiwork, years after, when the ship of war 
bearing Admiral Gervais and the fortunes of France 
put into port at Bergen on her way to Petrograd. 
Her voyage was the first public sign and token 
of the coming alliance. I went aboard ; and 
between decks, found the Catholic chaplain putting 
the conscripts through their three R's, lest even 
the Breton peasant, fresh from his flocks and herds, 
should escape. Jules Ferry, as minister, carried 
on the same good work. When it was done, the 
old Sorbonne of Paris became what it is to-day, a 
generating station of intellectual light for the whole 
nation, and virtually without cost to the consumer. 

With the same thoroughness, Rouvier organized 
French finance. He was a dark meridional, with 
a genius for figures, and something more — large 
views. He could think in millions. Here again 



224 MY HARVEST 

you had the personal note, as one of the secrets of 
popularity : Rouvier, like his party chief, loved 
good cheer. He was suitably mated with a woman 
who could shine by herself without any reflected 
light, even from him. She was the famous Claude 
Vignon, of a pen name, writer, artist, and between 
whiles one of the best cooks in Paris. Her intel- 
lectual hold on him was strengthened, with or 
without need, by her amazing dinners, which on 
Sundays, as a holiday task, she cooked all by 
herself. It was heroic, for she had still to take 
due care of her good looks. 

As a girl she was the sculptor of the day, and 
men with long memories could tell you of a bust 
from her chisel that was the sensation of the salon 
of 1853. She studied under Pradier, and was 
employed through his interest on great public 
works ; the cupids playing round the fountains 
in the square Montholon were by her hand. She 
had fashioned successfully a notable Bacchus, 
and a notable bust of Thiers — of course not as boon 
companions. In later life she took the political 
correspondence of the Independance Beige, at 
present time of writing published in London as 
one of the incidents of the German invasion ! 
In my time she was to be seen in the Press gallery 
of the Chamber at work on her despatch for the 
night's post, and this eventually brought her into 
contact with Rouvier, as member for Marseilles. 
He began by successfully managing a large house 
of business, and ended as the almost indispensable 
Minister of Finance of every republican government. 

Clemenceau, while of that party, fought for his 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 225 

own hand against its leaders. He continued that 
practice till he became a minister himself, when he 
was repaid in kind. I think it was more a matter of 
sporting taste than anything else. He was a born 
fighter : you had only to look at him to see that. 
The close-cropped hair gave the suggestion, the 
eyes, in their hollows made by the high cheek 
bones, gave the certainty. The death mask of 
Napoleon tells just the same tale. He was still most 
useful in holding a brief for the Radicals in a 
republic of moderates. His electoral meetings were 
invariably interesting as drama — in the struggle 
over the election of the bureau, the give and take 
of dialectic between the member and the crowd. 

Rochefort was against them all. There was the 
slipperiness of the eel in his composition, the 
venom of the snake, and every one by turns felt 
the smart of his poison, if not the death stroke. 
He had egged on the Commune to its mad venture ; 
and as the Versaillese troops came into Paris, he 
naturally went out. He was caught at Meaux, 
artistically made up for flight. In this extremity 
he made no scruple of begging for his life from 
the men he had done nothing but revile. Trochu 
was one of them, Gambetta, to whom he wrote a 
letter of suppliance, another. The latter got the 
death sentence commuted into one of transporta- 
tion. Years afterwards, when the suppliant, 
amnested and in full favour as the idol of the 
Parisian mob, renewed the attacks, he was publicly 
reminded of the obligation. He flatly denied it. 
Gambetta produced the letter. The other was 
equal to the occasion : he confessed to the hand- 



226 MY HARVEST 

writing, while still denying the appeal. He vaguely 
remembered, he said, having written something 
at the dictation of his advocate (no longer living 
to affirm or deny), but he had a clear recollection 
of having forbidden his friend to forward it. 
This served with his worshippers, and he went on 
spitting venom to the last, in the full enjoyment of 
what are called the good things of life. His word 
was unquestionable only when it came to pictures 
and bric-d-brac, of which he was quite a good judge. 

He began life as a government clerk, when 
Villemessant lured him to the Figaro with a 
splendid salary. It was the policy of the paper — 
to discover a new genius every quarter, work him 
to the very death of his vogue, and then scrap him 
for another. Rochefort was shrewd enough to 
dismiss himself in time. Foresight is better than 
repentance : — " What a goose I've been ! " were 
probably the last words of the one that laid the 
golden eggs. 

Louise Michel, another figure of the Commune, 
was of quite a different stamp — Anarchist and 
angel of pity in one. She derived from Rousseau 
— men were all good if only institutions would be 
so kind as to leave them alone — and she was 
simply incorrigible in her love and tenderness 
towards all sentient things. In her prison cell, she 
made friends with the rats and often asked them to 
dinner. Left to themselves, she found, they were 
far better than her own kind, and particularly in 
their care for their aged and infirm. On her way to 
New Caledonia, caged in a deck-house of steel with 
the other prisoners who took the air, she cheered 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 227 

her weaker comrades, though she had Httle to give 
them but a smile. As I knew her, when she came 
back under amnesty, she was thin, angular, with 
the long face of Flemish sainthood, and far beyond 
her prime. She had started in life as a school- 
mistress at Montmartre, but the insurrection soon 
claimed her for its own. She fought to the last, and 
surrendered only to secure her mother's safety. 
She defied her judges and the very government 
that offered clemency, refusing even to leave New 
Caledonia, till less culpable comrades had been 
set free. Twenty thousand people turned out to 
meet her at St. Lazare. 

I took care to be at her first public meeting. 
There was no applause, even when she rose. The 
tall figure mounted the platform, advanced to the 
front and without a preliminary Mesdames et 
Messieurs plunged at once into an address. It 
was one of the most effective I ever heard, just 
because it was devoid of all the arts of oratory. 
It gave the impression of an earnest woman who 
had simply left her fireside to speak on a public 
topic of importance. When she had done, you 
felt she would go home again, and become a very 
private citizen till the next meeting. There was 
not the slightest suggestion of the professional 
orator in the gesture, and scarcely any in the 
modulations. But the address told by a sort of rapt 
mysticism of manner, as though the speaker were 
making herself the mere mouthpiece of her Voices. 
The secret of its effect was in the perfect contrast 
between the manner and the matter, the latter, 
on this occasion, a fierce denunciation of the 



228 MY HARVEST 

capitalists, that did not shrink from the terrible 
issue of civil war. 

She declined a public banquet on her return, 
and started at once for her mother's village. 
The old lady had no share in the daughter's 
opinions, and indeed no sense of them. Her sole 
wish was for a quiet life for both. Later on I found 
her tucked up in bed in a Paris flat and quite well 
enough to be as troublesome as a healthy baby. 
When the talk turned to politics, Louise motioned 
me into the next room, while still leaving the door 
ajar lest anything should go wrong with her charge. 
Something did go wrong very soon, when a lusty 
cry came from the invalid : 

" Who is this gentleman, dear ? " 

" Oh, a friend, mother, only a friend." 

" What does he want ? " 

" Just a little matter of business." 

" How do you know he is not a policeman ? " 

" But he is not, mother ; and if he were " 

A pause ; then : 

" Louise ! " 

" Yes, little mother." 

" Ask him if he's a policeman, before you say 
another word." 

"Don't fidget, mother dear ! " 

How different the other type of anarchist, 
Ravachol. To think that such a woman should 
ever have lived in the same hemisphere, to say 
nothing of the same party, with him ! He was of a 
type common enough in French criminality, robber 
and murderer first, but still with a political theory 
for the pose. He cut throats for a living, gave 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 229 

some of the proceeds to the poor, and spent the 
rest in suppers to celebrate the extermination of a 
bourgeois. We, it may be observed, know nothing 
of this type. Bill Sikes is after the swag and no 
more, and never professes the slightest regard for 
the proletariat, if only from ignorance of the 
word. Ravachol's favourite plan was to enter a 
village shop kept by some thrifty old recluse, male 
or female, brain the occupant, and rifle the hoard. 
At other times, he kept an eye on the graveyards ; 
and where he heard of a recent funeral in which 
trinkets had been buried with the corpse, he dug 
down to it at dead of night, and groped for the 
prize. He was the prince, not to say the demigod, 
of the murderous Apaches who unite crime and 
party feeling in their profession of faith, and are 
heard of in Paris, and what is worse sometimes 
met, to this day. He was caught, by an onslaught 
of the police on his favourite cafe — but the place 
was blown up by his band as a punishment for 
supposed treachery on the part of the proprietor. 
His visit, under a strong guard, to the Concier- 
gerie was a Parisian event of the day. The 
criminal suspects are taken there immediately 
after arrest to be photographed, full face and 
profile, and measured on the system invented by 
M. Bertillon, and now supplemented by the sign 
manual of the finger-tips, on the Galton plan. 
The first gives the bone measurements which, as 
distinct from the fleshy ones known to the tailors, 
are supposed never to vary. The two together, 
with their hundreds of thousands of entries, form 
a collection at which the Recording Angel himself 



230 MY HARVEST 

might not disdain a glance. The excitement of this 
distinguished presence extended from his fellow 
criminals to the officials and even to the guards. 
They crowded round him, heedless of all else, 
with the exception of one prisoner who kept his 
head, and escaped by walking downstairs into the 
street. 

Their hero found his way in due course to the 
guillotine, dancing the Carmagnole as he went, and 
singing the accompaniment, though, as hyper- 
critical performers here and there objected, with 
a rather faltering voice. While he lay waiting 
for death, a lady well known in society found means 
to enter the courtyard and to offer him a bouquet 
through his prison bars. She afterwards gave me 
the particulars with great gusto, and made much 
of a photograph received in exchange for the flowers. 

It was inscribed : "To Madam : homage 

from one of the vanquished : Koenigstein Rava- 
chol." Of other portraits, also in her unique 
collection, one represented him in a tattered and 
torn condition, immediately after his arrest, with 
crumpled hair, and shirt collar torn all to pieces 
in the frightful struggle with his captors. Then 
again he figured as a dandy of the outer boulevards, 
frock coat, topper, and other masterpieces of the 
ready-made school. He reeked of the well-known 
vanity of criminals, and had some excuse for it in 
a rather striking face. 

The Panama scandal is hardly to be ignored in 
any study of the forces then shaping, for good or 
ill, the life of France. No doubt the French scheme 
for cutting the isthmus was largely ruined by 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 231 

corruption, and in particular by the necessity of 
squaring the Press. But many were in it, from the 
distinguished senator who had to fly to England 
when the cat came out of the bag, to the Radical 
deputy who tearfully owned to the bribe as but 
the wherewithal for his daughter's dot. M. de 
Lesseps, to his credit, at first declined to spend a 
penny for puffery, only to find his mistake when 
his first appeal for funds became a dead letter 
owing to the frigid silence of the papers or their 
open hostility. It fell quite flat with the small 
investors, not forgetting the maid-of-all-work in 
the kitchen, whose hoardings are the mainstay 
of French finance. They save like heroes, and 
speculate like children ; it is astonishing what 
kind of inducements, in their very triviality gross 
as a mountain, open, palpable, charm the money 
out of their pockets. 

I once made a small collection of these for my 
own amusement. One journal asked a hundred 
thousand francs for its support, and I believe got 
it. At any rate, when the Company, sadly wiser, 
issued their second appeal, with the remittance 
for secret service, the result almost exceeded 
expectation. 

You could not take up a paper without finding 
something of this sort : " It is near four centuries 
since Columbus died, yet his name has lost nothing 
of its splendour. The same splendour, the same 
popularity, universal and eternal, to-day attend 
the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps." 

Or again. " A Paris Cry. People think of 
nothing but Panama and of M. de Lesseps. Go 



232 MY HARVEST 

where you will, to the theatre, the restaurant, 
the confectioner's, the dressmaker's ; into ante- 
chambers, porters' lodges, drawing-rooms, clubs ; in 
the streets, omnibuses, railway stations — Panama ! 
— always Panama ! Attend a funeral, a marriage, 
or a trial — Panama ! Meet friend or stranger, still 
Panama ! " 

" The Question of the Day. 

" ' If you were very nice, do you know what you 
would do ? ' 

" ' What, my angel ? ' 

" ' Why, you would give me some shares in 
Panama for my New Year.' 

" And observe this is not a wearisome cry which 
one tries to forget like a street chorus, no, not at 
all. These three syllables, short, sharp, striking, 
do not grate on the ear. They sound joyously with 
the merry clink of gold. 

" Panama is the question of the day, and in a 
little while will become the question of the century, 
so I, who am no financier, have to do as all the 
world does, and think in Panama. The day 
before yesterday the comedian Talbot took his 
benefit. He is not in the habit of burying his gold 
in his garden, like Harpagon, the character he had 
just played, so he pocketed his savings for the 
night with a ' here goes for Panama.' 

" ' Well, boys,' said young A. yesterday, at the 
club, as he fobbed a handsome sum from the green 
table, ' all this, as the song says, is 

For Panama 
For Panama 
Ah! ah! ah!' 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 233 

" One of my fellow contributors on this journal 
who has come into a fortune of 200,000 francs, is 
at this very moment bawling in my ear, ' Oh, 
won't I just have a flutter in Panama ! ' Why, 
my very valet this morning left me half dressed 
to talk Panama. Even the worthy people, whose 
bank is their long stocking, are turning it inside 
out for M. de Lesseps. ' Take it,' they say, ' take 
everything ; pierce your Isthmus and win us a 
fortune.' You see they've confidence in him : 
parbleu ! who would not, after what he has done ? " 

This was the puff rattle-pate. Now for the puff 
serious : " America, uneasy on the score of her 
prerogatives, opposed the project, and this was 
not without its effect on some of our fellow citizens. 
Their ingratitude, however, did not weary the man 
who had conquered the Isthmus of Suez. An 
apostle of progress, strong in the truth within him, 
this young man and old pilgrim of civilization set 
out with his wonted ardour to bring light to the 
spirits that walked in darkness. He had hardly 
appeared before every doubt, every difliculty, 
vanished. The shrewd Yankees, convinced that 
they had no longer to fear European intervention, 
and assured of the neutralization of the canal, 
are now his allies, and are participating largely 
in the new enterprise. The subscription is hardly 
announced, yet demands are coming from every 
part of the globe. The financiers remember that 
the original Suez shares, issued at 4000 francs, are 
now worth 40,000 ; no wonder, then, that Americans, 
English, Germans, French, are disputing the honour 
of joining the Atlantic to the Pacific." 



234 MY HARVEST 

The very political spies were in it, and turned 
to it as a new branch of their trade. They are a 
great social force in their way. We have seen, by 
fairly recent revelations, how often they stand 
between the capable military officer and his pro- 
motion, when his political sympathies happen to 
be of the wrong sort. 

I knew of one who died in a sort of odour of 
social sanctity, in the sense of never getting found 
out. She was the daughter of a railway clerk at 
Lyons, and she married an officer of the garrison, 
well connected though just as poor as herself. 
They had a hard struggle to live on his pay, 
especially as they were obliged to keep up appear- 
ances. There was, however, one compensation 
for her ; the marriage eventually took her into a 
higher circle and made her acquainted with its 
ways. At first, though, she had her difficulties. 
Lyons, knowing her origin, was rather shy of the 
acquaintance ; but when she accompanied her 
husband to Paris she had a better chance, and 
with her really winning manners, she turned it to 
the best account. They wanted nothing but a 
little more money to make them happy, when he 
was ordered to Italy, only to get killed at Solferino, 
and to leave her, happily without children, but 
with no other resource than her widow's allowance 
from the State. She applied for further assistance, 
but having no interest (his relatives had never 
taken the slightest notice of her) the minister was 
obliged to inform her that he had nothing at his 
disposal. What was she to do ? She had acquired 
a taste for the pleasures of the capital, and to go 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 235 

back to Lyons and social obscurity was out of the 
question. 

The spy service was her happy thought. She 
did not know that spies are rarely engaged for 
the higher work until they have shown their mettle, 
and that the list in waiting is a long one. She 
wrote to the Prefecture to offer her services, and 
she had to wait five days for a " declined with 
thanks." But it occurred to her that the best way 
to find a market might be to show a sample. She 
knew something of the Faubourg St. Germain, 
as well as of the quarter of the Champs Elysees ; 
and she soon learned what was going on among 
declared enemies and pretended friends of the 
Second Empire. Chance favoured her ; a small 
knot of adventurers, like herself in want of money, 
were actually getting up a false plot against the 
government — a plot that like the Sheffield razor 
of the story, was simply meant to sell. They had 
found a few dupes among the work-people of the 
Faubourg St. Antoine, and, altogether taken in by 
our heroine, they were about to turn her to some 
account, when she forestalled the compliment at 
their expense. She wrote to the Prefecture again, 
though not in her own name, and this time the 
communication was acknowledged by an official 
in person, who came to tell her that she might 
continue her interesting observations. She did 
so, and with such effect that when the manufac- 
turers of the plot reached the office with their 
tardy disclosures they were shown to the door. 
With that she was immediately engaged. 

They gave her 3000 francs a year to start with, 



236 MY HARVEST 

and a promise of a rise, so she now did pretty 
well, and began to save for her old age. Her 
heaviest expense was the weekly reception which 
she was obliged to give to keep her place in the 
world. It was hard work : intimacy with fifty 
innocent families to have the chance of watching 
five who were going wrong. After a while the 
Government began to grow uneasy under the 
imminent failure of the Mexican expedition, and 
there were rumours, even at this early period, of 
an attempt at a Legitimist restoration. She found 
out that it was no more than the dream of a few 
enthusiasts, and that the person to be restored had 
no knowledge of the matter. It was an immense 
relief to the Emperor ; he sent word that she was 
to be looked after, and they raised her to 9000 
francs at a bound. They thought of employing 
her in Germany, but unfortunately she knew 
nothing of the language. 

Her employers had perfect confidence in her 
because she had no confidence in them. She never 
once signed her own name to a receipt or a report. 
They remonstrated, but she was inflexible, and 
they had to put up with a sort of nom de ylume, 
Lena. She never went to the Prefecture ; when she 
had anything to say that could not be written she 
summoned an agent to her house. She knew more 
than she told them ; the Empire might not last, and 
it would be a pretty thing to have her correspond- 
ence turned over by the minister of a rival system. 
When it fell, and the men of the 4th September had 
the rummaging of the archives, her letters became 
the talk of Paris, and her signature its mystery. 



FRANCE HERSELF AGAIN 237 

She went to the new incumbent one day, put 
her identity to him as a riddle, solved it for him 
when he gave it up, and asked him if she should 
go on as before. He could give but one reply, for 
the spy service survives governments. She was 
kept on, even after the fall of M. Thiers, and she 
made herself useful to the Marshal's government 
by tracking a German colleague of her own sex, 
who had worked herself into the confidence of 
General de Cissey, then Minister of War. This 
fair " curious impertinent " was finding out all 
sorts of things about the new organizations of the 
army, when her industry was interrupted by the 
abrupt dismissal of the General from his post, and 
by an order to herself to leave Paris by the night 
train. 

Lena died in harness — of a cold caught at a 
soiree ; and of the one or two hundred persons 
who attended the funeral, probably not more than 
a couple knew that she was anything more than an 
officer's widow who had lived on her means. 



CHAPTER XVII 
PEOPLE AND THINGS 

THE French politicians were not to have the 
work of reconstruction all to themselves ; the 
ideologists bore a hand in it, and there was many 
a tug of war between the old faiths and the new. 
This was especially the case in art. The academical 
tradition, as represented by Gerome, Cabanel, 
Bouguereau, Lefebvre, and even Meissonier, was 
at odds with a naturalism still in its period of 
riot. Manet and even Courbet had led the way of 
innovation, Bastien-Lepage followed, Degas was 
perhaps the greatest force of the school, with 
his marvellous work in the rendering of movement. 
He never lacked disciples and even devotees, but 
he had often to wait for buyers. One day Gerome 
dropped in to look at the new work, though with 
his laboured studies of statuesque form he was 
hardly in a position to enjoy it. But his Eastern 
sketches in the neighbourhood of Seraglio Point, 
and his spoils of the bazaars held the market, so, in 
the circumstances, the visit was something of an 
act of condescension. Degas waited in vain for a 
word of praise. At length he could stand it no 
longer, and a surly " Hein ! I suppose it's not 
Turk enough for you," brought the visit to a close. 
A greater than either, Rodin, was still looking 

238 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 239 

for full recognition. The majority of collectors, 
who wait for the fact of fame rather than the 
promise, were still to seek. I once had the honour 
of breakfasting with him, and I remember my host 
as a square -set figure in a sort of Sunday suit of 
ill-fitting black, of which it may be enough to say 
that it carried out none of his subsequent theories 
of the function of drapery. I was not qualified for 
prophecy of his future greatness, but I came away 
with the impression that I had met a man quite 
out of the common ; and when I afterwards saw 
his John the Baptist, I began faintly to divine 
what was coming to pass. I had yet to wait for 
long years to see one glorious fulfilment in literature 
— his volume on the cathedrals of France. Reims, 
Laon, Soissons, Beauvais, in their great sequence 
of schools and inspiration — alas, what is left of 
one of them now ! It is a book on a subject greater 
even than art, the soul of a race : " I am an artist 
and a plebeian, and the cathedrals were built by 
the artists for the people." 

Gustave Dore was another of the interesting 
figures of the time, as one of its greatest illus- 
trators, but he made a serious mistake in trying, 
on imperfect training, and more serious defects 
of nature, to rank as a painter. The academical 
school would not have him at any price m this 
character. His sense of colour was almost non- 
existent — his giant pictures seemed to cumber the 
wall at the annual shows. It was much the same 
with his sense of character, his figures seemed all of 
one family. Racially, if not morally, he exagger- 
ated the note of the brotherhood of man. He 



240 MY HARVEST 

worked desperately hard for the revision of the 
critical sentence, but towards the last, one cannot 
but fear, with the certainty that he was working 
in vain. This led to moods of depression, induced 
by the very buoyancy of nature that made him 
keenly alive to the agony of disappointment. 

He was seen at his happiest and best at his 
Sunday-at-homes in the old house in the Faubourg 
St. Germain. A few people came to a simple 
dinner, and this was followed by a reception on 
the same scale. The aged mother took her place 
at the head of the table, with children to the right 
and grandchildren to the left. Gustave was the 
youngest son, and the only one unmarried, but he 
held the other place of honour as a member of her 
household. He was still the gamin of the family, 
full of wild animal spirits, which often found vent in 
mischief, and incurred parental rebuke — " my boy ! 
my boy ! don't make such a noise." It pleased 
the old lady to forget that, since she first talked 
to him in that way, he had become one of the best 
known men in France, and it pleased him even 
more to have it forgotten. 

They took their coffee in a sort of domestic 
studio built in the courtyard. Here, at one step, 
you passed from Paris to Bohemia, though not 
exactly to those semi-savage recesses of the country 
that poor Miirger explored. The light from the 
ceiling fell on the strangest medley of picturesque 
disorder ever seen under an artist's roof. This 
was the room in which Dore drew — he painted 
elsewhere — and the great central table was heaped 
up with his sketches on paper or on the block. 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 241 

and with costly volumes of illustration already 
published. Scenes of the life of all countries and 
of all ages were here before you in dazzling pro- 
fusion. By and by the old servant, Pierre, came 
in with light refreshments, which one could hardly 
refuse without giving him pain. The guests, he 
seemed to think, were as much his as his master's, 
and he accordingly pushed his tray among them 
after the fashion of that bygone time to which he 
so decidedly belonged. He was useful in more ways 
than one, for Dore unconsciously took him as a 
model when he wanted a long and somewhat 
mournfully serious visage, though neither the 
artist nor his victim seemed to have the slightest 
idea of the fact. Pierre would turn over dozens 
of sketches in which he appeared as a praying 
Crusader, a love-lorn Spaniard, or a thoughtful 
Jew, without once recognizing himself in his new 
and fanciful surroundings. The other had simply 
mistaken memory for imagination in this part of 
his work. Munkacsy, the Hungarian painter, was 
often of the party. Another familiar figure was 
the little old lady who translated the English texts 
of the subjects for illustration, and helped Dor6 
with his correspondence. 

He was as frolicsome as a child. At one moment 
he jumped on a chair and played the fiddle ; and 
here it was interesting to note how his love of 
music — he was no mean performer — gradually 
got the better of his mere sense of fun, and made 
him earnest in spite of himself. He began for an 
antic ; he went on to execute some difficult passage 
of Rossini, his favourite composer, with almost 



242 MY HARVEST 

the strength, the dehcacy and the certainty of 
touch of a soloist at the opera. What would he 
do next ? No one could tell, himself least of all. 
As it turned out, perhaps, he was going to sing. 
He gave no warning — not a cough was heard ; 
but just started from the place where he happened 
to be when the fancy came into his head. You 
might listen or not, as you liked : he was not 
singing to please you, but himself, and the room 
was almost big enough to allow you to strike up 
on your own account in another corner. Sometimes 
it was a quaint rigmarole on the theme of " a plain 
woman for my taste " : — 

For beauty 'tis a thing that passes, 
But plainness lasts for evermore. 

" Didn't I tell you," says the mother, " that 
he's only a great boy ? " 

It was good going while it lasted : "all shall 
die." 

There came a time when he took to his bed in a 
fit of melancholy, due to the lack of both official 
and critical appreciation. The mother felt that 
it was time for strong measures, and she went 
straight to the Minister of Fine Arts, and told him 
that her boy was dying for want of the Cross of 
the Legion of Honour. The Cross was given, and 
he recovered at once. For all that, I think, it was 
sheer heartbreak that so prematurely laid him 
low. 

There was a welter of new schools in literature, 
but hardly one out of which any living soul could 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 243 

find a use, till Barres and Bazin settled down to 
their work. Most of the earlier novelties deserved 
all they got at the hands of Nordau. One was a 
sort of school of the first personal pronoun, for the 
worship of the noble self. Considering the status 
of its founders as human beings, this must have 
been wholly an effort of faith. Others, perhaps 
in a natural deduction, stood for the littleness of 
life. These called themselves the Impassives, their 
guiding principle was that of saying nothing and 
lying low. They differed only from their more 
distinguished followers of fable, in saying too 
much. The Mystics had some vogue for a while, 
under a creature, half painter, half writer, and 
whole crank, who called himself the Sar Peladan 
— the first title because it suggested a descent 
from " the royal sage Sardanapalus." He even 
shaved for the part. The worst infirmity of all of 
them was their affectation of a regenerating 
mission. There was more to uplift the soul of a 
nation in a single song of Theresa than in all the 
works and days of the whole gang. 

Without precisely intending it, Theresa had 
been a sort of mainstay of the Second Empire. 
She kept the masses in good humour, and was of 
more use to Napoleon III than a dozen legions. 
She might have associated herself with him in the 
famous boast : " As to order, I will answer for 
that." Her " Nothing is Sacred for a Sapper " 
helped to reconcile the people to the army, and her 
" Bearded Woman " to reconcile them to themselves. 
The Emperor sent for her to sing to him, and gave 
her a substantial memento of the meeting. She 



244 MY HARVEST 

was not beautiful, grace was not a word in her 
vocabulary, but she had abundant humour and a 
well-trained voice of extraordinary power, which 
she deliberately threw out of gear for the production 
of the most unheard-of effects. She sang ordinary 
songs in an extraordinary manner, deliberately 
distorting the final note of some cooing chorus 
into the bass of a fog-horn with catarrh. It was art 
in its negation of itself, and supremely welcome to 
a public bored to death by the monotony of its 
pleasures. Her gestures matched the note, and the 
two together constituted " Theresa's trick." That 
trick is now known to every cahotine of them all, 
and its monetary value has sunk under the excess 
of supply. 

She was born in Paris of very poor parents : 
her father played the fiddle at the barrier halls. 
She learned his airs as he practised them, and 
sang them to herself for want of something better 
to do. The music-halls were growing, as they 
have since grown the world over, from back rooms 
to gilded saloons. Theresa thought she would 
try her fortune with them, and she obtained an 
engagement at the Alcazar in a company which 
she described as a pitiable collection of the un- 
known. Their main line was sentiment ; and much 
against her will she followed the fashion. The 
company supped together on New Year's Eve, 
and, to amuse them, in strict confidence, she hit 
on the idea of giving her " Flower of the Alps " in 
a sort of rag-time. The lackadaisical words and air 
of the original were preserved, but the new manner 
of rendering them expressed her utter contempt 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 245 

for both. She was rapturously encored, and this 
time, having got the wretched Flower down, she 
proceeded to jump on it, in the passion of her 
anger and disdain. When she left the table the 
director of a rival house sidled up to her with the 
whisper of an engagement. 

Willingly ; but in what line ? 

Burlesque. 

Nonsense ; I shall never get a hearing, they 
want sentiment, you know. 

I daresay ; but will you do it ? 

Why not ? but you are making a mistake. 

Leave that to me. 

In less than a year she was earning almost any 
sum she had the face to ask. 

It was a fishwife tearing the poetry of the keep- 
sakes to tatters. It pleased everybody — the poor 
by its savage irony, the others by its appeal to 
their sense of a general emptiness of things. The 
loud and deliberately vulgar woman became the 
favourite vocalist of a cynical age. 

She married and retired, but came back again, 
years after Sedan, to sing her old clients into heart 
and faith for better times. Her favourite theme 
was marriage as a patriotic duty : Mariez vous ! 
France's best hope was in her children : let her 
see to it that the children were there. 

Everybody with the slightest pretension to 
influence was at work on the revival of the national 
spirit, each in his own way. The pulpit became 
patriotic as a matter of course, but it did not 
take its proper place in the leadership of the 



246 MY HARVEST 

movement because reconstruction had brought 
but a sword between Church and State. In some 
quarters, even now, the patriotism is rather that 
of the old order than of the new. The too-httle 
known M. Maurras, a force in Hterature, seems 
only to love his country in proportion as he hates 
Jews, foreigners, democrats and wellnigh everybody 
but the King and the Pope. 

Pere Didon lived to take a more truly catholic 
view in the non-dogmatic sense, but he had to 
suffer for it. I heard him preach at St. Philippe 
du Roule, and could not help feeling at the time 
that he was on dangerous ground. His theme 
was the extremely difficult one for a Catholic, the 
reconciliation between religion and science, and 
he seemed to do wonders with it while we were 
under the spell of his oratory. But suddenly, in 
the full tide of his popularity, he was silenced 
by an order from Rome, and banished to a distant 
convent in Corsica, with a strict injunction to 
hold his tongue. He did so for a whole year, when 
he was released, but only for foreign travel, and 
he never offended in the same way again. It was 
the most dramatic incident of its time, and it 
had lasting effects on modernism and all other 
movements of the kind. 

Pere Monsabre, another famous preacher, made 
sure of his ground from the first in his Lenten 
sermons at Notre Dame. He left his cell once a 
year for this duty, and his coming was the event 
of the sacred season. When Hyacinthe apostatized 
(for strict Catholics always maintain that he did 
no less) the Church looked round for another 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 247 

intellectual champion and found him in the fiery 
Dominican. He came like a special gift of Provi- 
dence — he was an Ultramontane of the Ultra- 
montanes — an antidote to the Gallican bane, and 
he defended Rome and the Council through thick 
and thin. The disasters of the war were a trial 
for him and his order, but he saved the reputation 
of both by showing that he was essentially a 
Frenchman in feeling, if not always in faith. 

To characterize him according to Catholic notions, 
he was a St. Thomas Aquinas for the crowd. He 
had formed himself on the model of that giant 
theologian who undertook to review all the truth 
known to the world and to harmonize it with the 
teachings of the Roman Church. The Summa 
Theologies was his second Bible ; and his mission 
was to make its teaching as familiar to babes as 
to the wise. Like its author, he was nothing if 
not argumentative, logical, a system builder. The 
occasional sermon was in no way to his taste ; 
with few exceptions his discourses belonged to 
one vast series, and were but so many finely 
fitting parts of a majestic structure of faith. For 
years he preached on the Creed alone ; and when 
I heard him was still in its opening passage, though 
he had filled another volume of his works. 

Being a popularizer, his style was familiar. 
The language, however, was choice, and truths 
divine seemed to come mended from that tongue 
with its French of the Academy tempered by the 
little mannerisms of the man of the world. 

Pere Hyacinthe was of course a declared rebel, 
but his fate showed how difficult it is for a priest 



248 MY HARVEST 

of our time to play the part of Luther over again, 
and to leave one Church for a commanding position 
in another of his own making or his own choice. 
He professed to be an Old Catholic of the school of 
Dollinger, but as he had to take root somewhere 
he entered into communion with the English 
establishment, and even placed himself under one 
of its Colonial bishops — ruling, I think, from 
Gibraltar. He used to hold Sunday services in a 
lecture hall in the Latin Quarter, hard by the 
Pantheon, but they lacked the mystical influence 
of the Roman pomp. How different this setting 
from the stately one of Notre Dame, which he 
filled with worshippers in his great day, and where 
his word was law, just because it was not his, but 
only the voice of a whole hierarchy of sanctified 
figures. On his lecture platform he was but one 
more recusant at the best, with a doctrine more 
or less of his own contriving. He was unpleasantly 
reminded of the difference by the indignant faithful 
who seldom failed to attend for the purpose of 
bringing the services into contempt. Well-bred 
Frenchmen have a peculiar habit in matters of 
this sort. Nothing can exceed the decorum of their 
disorder at public meetings not to their liking. 
They neither hiss nor " boo." On the contrary, 
they seem to listen with a rapt attention, until the 
moment comes when they think proper to draw 
out a silver whistle, blow a single note on it, short 
and sharp, and then restore it to its case, to listen 
with the same attention as before. This is organized 
interruption ; and, when the time has come to 
stop it, the offender suffers himself to be conducted 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 249 

to the door by another well-bred person of the 
opposite persuasion, and retires raising his hat. 
I do not say it describes the demeanour of all 
classes of dissentients ; it is only the way of those 
who are solicitous of the proprieties. 

The sermon was all that the sermon of a great 
preacher should be in manner and matter, but 
somehow it seemed woefully lacking in its scenic 
effects. The bare benches and whitewashed walls 
made but a poor substitute for the arches and 
altars of the great cathedral. Monsabre in his 
statuesque robes of white flannel, though far less 
of a fine figure of a man, was a much more impres- 
sive personality than this tall middle-aged gentle- 
man in a frock-coat, with nothing of the livery 
of his vocation but his tie. 

On his retirement from the Roman communion, 
Hyacinthe married an American lady of charming 
presence and agreeable manners. Both by her 
nationality and her position as the wife of a 
clergyman who had his way to make in his calling, 
she could hardly help showing signs of great energy 
of character. Whenever her husband's bishop 
passed through Paris she took care to have him to 
luncheon, and on one occasion it was my good 
fortune to be of the party. It would have made a 
chapter for TroUope. The fare was all that a lover 
of good cheer could desire, and the delicate atten- 
tions it implied were accentuated by the deferential 
amiability of the hostess. She smiled, I will not 
say with counterfeited glee, at every prelatical 
joke ; and it was " Yes, Bishop " or " No, Bishop " 
at every turn, when he laid down the law. 



250 MY HARVEST 

Meanwhile France was beginning to seek in 
colonial expansion compensation of a kind for the 
lost provinces at home. She was active in this 
kind of adventure both in Asia and in Africa, in 
the latter mainly with the help of M. de Brazza, a 
naval lieutenant, of Italian origin, in her service. 
Stanley's work had shown that the Congo was one 
of the mightiest rivers for commerce and empire, 
yet France had no direct access to it from her West 
African possession. De Brazza was sent out on a 
secret mission, though nominally only as an ex- 
plorer at large, and he came back with a whole 
sheaf of treaties with native chiefs giving him a 
short cut to the stream across their territories. 
The treaties probably cost no more to negotiate 
than a liberal outlay in rum and beads ; but they 
were signed, if only with a mark. Stanley was 
furious. They had been obtained, he said, largely 
by information, and by still more substantial 
assistance, supplied by himself for purely inter- 
national ends. He had traced the course of the 
river for mankind, and here was France trying to 
get a footing on her own account. Her agent might 
have perished on his way, without the aid and com- 
fort he received when his stores had given out. 

It was a pretty quarrel, but Stanley was no diplo- 
matist, and he managed it badly at the start. He 
took the opportunity of a mere congratulatory dinner 
offered to himself by an American club in Paris, 
to deliver a bitter attack on the French explorer, 
whose name had been carefully excluded from the 
list of guests. He began by telling us that he had 
met his destined victim on the boulevard in the 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 251 

morning, and said to him : " My dear friend, I am 
going to give you your finishing stroke." Of course 
this announcement froze us all in our places as we 
sat. We did not wish to see anyone receive a 
stroke of that, or any other kind ; we wanted only 
to hear and make pleasant speeches, and to have 
just so much intellectual excitement as might 
facilitate the process of digestion. Besides, by the 
very position of some of the party, we were bound 
not to assist in the fray. Many were influential, 
official, scientific, or financial persons ; in fact, 
amongst the seventy or eighty there was scarcely 
one who had not something to lose by being iden- 
tified with a stand-up fight. So, as poor Stanley 
went on, the silence grew more profound, and 
though there was a cheer at the end, rightly inter- 
preted it was a cheer of thankfulness for a happy 
release. The finishing stroke had certainly failed. 
The papers of the next day were by turns angry 
and elate — angry with Stanley for his exhibition 
of what was called la brutalite Americaine in his 
unhappy allusions to Brazza's personal appearance 
when he met him on the Congo ; elate at the thought 
that he never would have been in such a rage, 
unless his rival had secured some great triumph 
for France. 

The best of it was De Brazza contrived to be 
there to hear the speech. Stanley had hardly got 
under way when the door opened, and the other, 
with a deprecating bow to the company for the 
interruption, glided into a vacant chair and sat 
out the whole oration. When it was over, he 
apologized for his intrusion. Happening to pass, 



252 MY HARVEST 

he had heard the welcome voice of his brother 
explorer with a mention of his own name, and he 
had been unable to resist the temptation of drop- 
ping in to pay his respects. And, since there he was, 
might he now crave permission to say a few words 
in his own defence. Then, with the same perfect 
courtesy and finish of manner, he went on to express 
his profound obligations to his fellow traveller for 
the gift of a few pairs of boots and pots of pro- 
visions to a colleague at his utmost need, and to 
promise that if ever the situation was reversed, it 
would be his pride and glory to repay in kind. 
With this, and with a few other ironical touches, 
he bowed himself out. 

Stanley had unquestionably been worsted in the 
first bout, but he was not the man to sit down 
under defeat. His sheer faith in his will was enor- 
mous. He once said to me that, even under sen- 
tence of death, he would never take it lying down, 
he would be dragged to the scaffold by main force, 
hoping for the miracle. 

A few days after he invited Brazza to breakfast 
at the Hotel Meurice, with a dozen or so of friends, 
including Sir Owen Lanyon and a few of the corre- 
spondents. It was only to join battle once more. 
On the removal of the cloth they fell to, at first 
with maps and plans, afterwards with wine spilt 
on the board to indicate the course of the great 
river, franc pieces for the settlements, and spent 
lucifer matches for the forest routes. 

" What right had you to hoist your flag here ? " 
said Stanley, dabbing a coin in the puddle ; "we 
were there before you." 



PEOPLE AND THINGS 253 

" I never hoisted it there at all," returned the 
other, boldly dabbing his coin lower down, " but 
I got over yonder before you." 

*' Impossible ; you could never have done it 
from French territory in a three days' march." 

" Why not ? Permit me to draw the bend of 
the river as it really runs," and with nimble fore- 
finger he changed the course of his puddle to suit 
his view of the case. 

At times some had streams on their own account 
and all talked together. It was quite amusing to 
study the different characteristics of the men at 
the table. Brazza with his long, thin, Quixote-like 
face, and the nervous animation of his Southern 
race ; Stanley with a quieter manner, and eyes 
that seemed all light whenever he thought he had 
scored. The placid Sir Owen Lanyon, as an English 
official, was of course " out of it," but he watched 
the game, while the correspondents, with a meek 
air of seeking nothing but the improvement of their 
minds, artfully kept the players up to the mark. 
The lieutenant was led into admissions which 
made it pretty clear that he had been sent to Africa 
in a twofold capacity. His position enabled his 
government, at need, to disavow him as a mere 
agent of the Belgian Association, or to back him as 
an officer of France. 

Stanley had scrambled through on points. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
VICTORIAN LONDON 

MY next stage was London. I saw that with 
a few years more of it I should have to 
choose my naturahzation of the spirit and remain 
Enghsh or become French. It is as difficult to 
have the two natures in equal possession as to 
have the two languages. The French point of view 
would gradually claim me for its own if I stayed, 
so I kept England as a country and France as a 
friend. This implies no moral judgment between 
them ; it is only a statement of preferences 
biassed, and rightly, by feeling and the claims of 
habit. 

So I made the great change, crossed the sea with 
my simple belongings, and again went into chambers 
in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was London, and for 
me, as English born and bred, it was the larger 
world. 

There was an interest of another kind which 
brought me into touch once more with the Vic- 
torian epoch of my earlier years. I could not have 
missed it for anything : Victorian I was for good 
or ill, and that epoch of history would for ever 
leave its mark. It was ageing : there was grey in 
its locks ; we had yet to celebrate the first Jubilee ; 
as it stood it was a whole and self-contained 

264 



VICTORIAN LONDON 255 

manifestation of the human spirit. If it had no 
longer the same cocksure confidence in itself, it was 
still fairly well satisfied, and inclined to report ' no 
change.' The great strivings, the entirely satis- 
fying ideals of the opening of the reign had lost 
some of their driving force, but enough remained 
to give the sense of vitality. The period was still 
in a state kindred to that known in physiology as 
living on one's fat. In famines, we are told, the 
portly people hold out longest because of their 
reserve of adipose matter : there is some nutriment 
in the stomach if there is none in the larder. The 
good Victorians believed that they had the where- 
withal in Tennyson and Browning, in Ruskin and 
Carlyle, and even with their inheritance of Adam 
Smith, commonly supposed to be no digestive for 
the others, though he was a moralist of the first 
order in his least-known book. These were for law 
and regulation, the ordered life, the ethic of con- 
duct, morals, duty, the traditional pieties — benevo- 
lent or at any rate beneficent capital, submissive 
labour, wealth without luxury, poverty without 
revolt. The nineteenth century and the progress 
of the age held the field, and had yet to become 
" this so-called nineteenth century " of the stump 
orator. 

What some pessimists were able to think of it 
was far from being the general note. Their Latter 
Day view, then a heresy, now almost a common- 
place, till Alfred Russel Wallace redeemed its 
reputation with his Wonderful Century, came out, 
quite recently, in full and perfect echo. Edward 
Carpenter, the recluse of our northern hills, had to 



256 MY HARVEST 

return thanks for congratulations on his seventieth 
birthday, and did it in these terms : 

" Coming to my first consciousness, as it were of 
the world at the age of sixteen (at Brighton in 1860), 
I found myself — and without knowing where I was 
— in the middle of that strange period of human 
evolution, the Victorian age, which in some respects, 
one now thinks, marked the lowest ebb of modern 
civilized society : a period in which not only com- 
mercialism in public life, but cant in religion, pure 
materialism in science, futility in social conventions, 
the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of 
the human heart, the denial of the human body 
and its needs, the huddling concealment of the 
body in clothes, the ' impure hush ' on matters of 
sex, class division, contempt for manual labour, 
and the cruel barring of women from every natural 
and useful expression of their lives, were carried 
to an extremity of folly difficult for us now to 
realize. 

" As I say, I did not know where I was. I had 
no certain tidings of any other feasible state of 
society than that which loafed along the Brighton 
parade or tittle-tattled in drawing-rooms. I only 
knew I hated my surroundings. I even sometimes, 
out of the midst of that absurd life, looked with 
envy, I remember, on the men with pick and shovel 
in the roadway and wished to join in their labour ; 
but between, of course, was a great and impassable 
gulf fixed, and before I could cross that I had to 
pass through many stages. I only remember how 
the tension and pressure of those years grew and 
increased — as it might do in an old boiler when the 



VICTORIAN LONDON 257 

steam-ports are closed, and the safety-valve shut 
down ; till at last, and when the time came that I 
could bear it no longer, I was propelled with a kind 
of explosive force, and with considerable velocity, 
right out of the middle of the nineteenth century 
and far on into the twentieth ! " 

Tennyson was the great singer of that earlier age, 
an c^ its great poet, say what you like of him. J It 
suits'^some of the new schools to run him down, but 
without imputing motives one may say that they 
lack the standpoint for judgment. They were 
born too late for that. The best judges of a man 
are his contemporaries. They alone know what 
new thing he has brought into the world. Instinc- 
tively they turn to him for the fresh concept of 
life and nature that helps them. The critic of a 
new time, who inherits the concept only as plati- 
tude at the best, is in no position to feel the rapture 
of the sense of service. 

The Victorian Laureate simply burst on his own 
generation, with his classic form plus the passion 
for nature, his pantheon of gods and goddesses who 
were all breathing a breath of life which they had 
not enjoyed since the time of the Greeks, or at 
any rate the Elizabethans. The stuffing and the 
Berlin wool of the intervening period seemed to be 
all cast aside. There was a most exhilarating 
sense of great problem, and great solution to match 
— England still aspiring to save Europe by her 
example, a little smug and pretentious no doubt, 
but with all the dignity of a conviction. 

Only those who lived even as mere boys and 
girls in their teens at the opening of the Crimean 



258 MY HARVEST 

war, can realize the hopes and the aspirations with 
which the country plunged into that great adven- 
ture. The lover's cry in Maud sounded throughout 
the whole Anglo-Saxon world, and Edgar Poe, no 
mean judge in life and art, worshipped its author. 
It was the young queen on the throne, unmatched 
as a symbol of the purification of manners since 
Spenser's dream of Faerie. Laugh as one likes 
now — and it is but a forced laugh at best — she was 
the very soul of all the loyalties of the age, 
another Una with the lion as her henchman and 
arm of the flesh. What matter that it now suggests 
only the lion of the royal arms : there was the 
faith that atones for all. 

Our poet lived to grow old — who can help that, 
or would if he could ! Other times other manners. 
The Idylls of the King followed Maud in its due 
sequence of the pitiless years and their pitiless dis- 
enchantment s. It was a true enchantment when 
it came — that is enough. 

The liveliest image of the change is to be found 
in the comparison between the Magda of Suder- 
mann and the whole sisterhood of the Tennysonian 
type, especially the Guinevere, by this time old 
enough to be her grandmother many times removed. 
Guinevere's lapse is her sin : " Thy golden head, 
my pride in happier summers, at my feet " ; we 
all know it by heart. Magda's lapse is her whim, 
at worst but her indiscretion ; and she has no 
forgiveness to ask. She has come back to the old 
home just to see the old people, if anything else 
only to forgive them for their ban that with a less 
self-satisfied nature might have spoiled her career. 



VICTORIAN LONDON 259 

Each type was true in its time and of its time, and 

there is nothing to be said for or against it on 

account of the mere accident of the setting. Truth 

to the hfe of the moment is all you can ask of any 

piece of literature. " Tennyson seemed immense 

to his contemporaries," says a modern critic, who 

rashly undertakes to fix him up for posterity. 

Immense he was. Magda may live to become a 

hussy yet : in such matters there is no last word. 

And above all avoid cant phrases: Mid- Victorian, 

now a reproach at the service of every puny 

whipster of the chair, was the word of the spell in 

its hour. Its essential poet has his vision of a day 

of supersession, and the courage to take it as in 

the order of things : 

Come, my friends, 
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down ; 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles whom we knew. 

Carlyle was another man of the moment in the 
sense of one who, in his fidelity to it, was yet a 
man of all time. Such high teachings go to the 
making of great nations, such occasional lapses 
are but the weaknesses of the flesh. He blew a 
trumpet blast for the battle of life, and his foibles 
were but his pauses to recover his wind. Why 
affect to repent of him now ? Ruskin — as art 
critic, dead if you like — as seer of a new political 
economy, safe and sound for all time. The Brontes, 



260 MY HARVEST 

Mid- Victorian for the worst only in some dowdy 
phrase that has lost its force of appeal, but great 
for ever in bringing a new thing into the world just 
when it was wanted. Theirs was the Wellington 
touch on the iron string of duty, the sense of the 
novel as the epic of life. Dickens — what a revela- 
tion in new departures of the same kind ! the 
apotheosis of the common man, till then but a low- 
comedy super for the background of the piece ; 
Thackeray in his greater work, and again with 
the sense of fiction as the epic of a whole age of 
manners as vast in its sweep as a picture of Italian 
pageantry. 

Browning will need the same charity of con- 
struction — has indeed already come to need it, now 
that so many have begun to make wry faces over 
a too cheery optimism which threatens to pall. 
His was pre-eminently a sane genius sufficing to 
itself in its supreme contentment with his time as 
he found it, and his perfect faith and trust in all 
the times to come. The greatest visionary in the 
finer sense of the word, and withal the greatest 
diner out. 

I saw something of him through his intimacy 
with the Corkrans, then settled in London, who 
had known him and his household in Paris in his 
day of little things. His life in Paris was simplicity 
itself. The two poets, husband and wife, and the 
husband's father and sister lived for a time under 
the same roof. The old man was allowanced in 
pocket-money, partly as there was then not much 
money of any kind going round, but also because 
he could not be trusted to keep any of it that came 



VICTORIAN LONDON 261 

to his share, the moment he reached the bookstalls 
on the quays. At last it had to be little more than 
just enough for his omnibus. For all that his 
daughter, Miss Browning, who was treasurer, had 
often to yield to a piteous appeal for a few coppers 
over to enable him to complete a bargain on which 
he had already left the deposit of his fare. 

Every day's wanderings seemed to yield him a 
type for his sketch-book, either from memory of 
his life in England, or from fresh observation. 
To this day Miss Alice Corkran, the last represen- 
tative of one branch of her family, has in her pos- 
session these precious jottings which were the 
delight of her infancy when she stood little higher 
than the old man's knee. The figures are dabbed 
in as though with primitive colours fresh from the 
earth, the descriptive legend sometimes issues 
balloon wise from their lips. What is it all, in its 
deeper significance, but the Men and Women of the 
son in the sketch to which he has given the place 
of honour of the series ? 

He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, 
The man who shces lemons into drink. 
The coffee-roaster's brasier and the boys 
That volunteer to help him turn its winch. 
He glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye, 
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string, 
And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall. 

That was the old man on his rambles, with one 
or other of the Corkran children to bear him com- 
pany. His favourite, Alice, was afterwards the 
charming writer for children of both growths. One 
day the pair were missing at the dinner hour, and 



262 MY HARVEST 

both families set up the hue and cry — ^to find them 
at last by the riverside, the old man sketching for 
his life, and the child at his elbow munching a cake. 
Any bit of character that came his way was irresist- 
ible to him, and he had to make a note of it at once. 
In one book of the kind — before me as I write — I 
find a rough customer with dishevelled hair and 
all-pervading scowl, labelled " Barabbas." Further 
on it is " The Tragedy," suggesting playful reflec- 
tions on his son's not altogether successful struggle 
for the honours of dramatic authorship. " I say, 
Dick," runs the legend, " my brother Tom's been 
writing a tragedy. Very deep one I can assure you, 
for none of us understand a line of it. One line is 
not to be laughed at : it displays a wonderful 
acquaintance with the Copernican system." 

After this we have " The Swindlers," the time- 
honoured confidence trick, in a setting of the 
manners and customs of the day. 

Many drawings are untitled, and we have to 
depend on the dialogue for the cue : " My brother 
— ? read son — isn't one of them that write poetry 
by the pailfull — when he sits down to write he 
always takes time to consider, he always thinks 
first." 

Then the lawyers have their turn, in a set of 
skits racy in character and fun. There is even a 
dim adumbration of Sludge the Medium in — 
" Master's comp'tnts — and, when you've done 
with it — says he will thank you for one of them 
tables. Some of the farmers from Salisbury have 
been laying a wager of a supper and two dozen of 
wine, that they'll make it dance." Even " A 



VICTORIAN LONDON 263 

Genealogy of Abdel-Kader " has its place, copied 
apparently from " Galignani, 13 December, 1852," 
though this is mere scrap-book lore. But the rest, 
'and by no stretch of fancy, is the germ in Browning 
the father, of Browning the son, without the touch 
for genius that was Nature's own secret, and 
probably will be to the end of time. 

Perhaps, with a better chance, the old bank 
clerk might himself have left something for the 
anthologies. Let that be as it may, he was well 
and generously inspired, when he determined to 
do his best for his son by giving him a University 
education. Without this the young poet might 
have found his way too hard, for with it he was 
often sore beset. He might dare be himself in new 
methods, since he was of the cultured band, and 
his eccentricities compelled toleration at the least. 
So, from the first, he had all the benefit of the 
classic environment. He nothing common did, or 
mean, to earn his living. He was spared the black- 
ing factory of Dickens ; and though even this 
proved a blessing in disguise to the novelist, as a 
matter of choice it would have been a rash bid for 
success, only to be justified by the result. The 
" poetic child " wants a good deal of nursing, yet 
it must be of the right sort. The wrong throws it 
all out of gear. 

I have often thought that Watts-Dunton took 
too much pains with his ministrations of this kind. 
He seemed to cure his nurslings of every bad habit, 
including the genius. They were reclaimed to 
respectability, but too often at the expense of the 
divine fire. Yet he might have been warned, if he 



264 MY HARVEST 

had condescended to be aware of it, by the reforma- 
tion of the last of the Cruikshanks — a sad repro- 
bate of the coarser kind in the earHer and successful 
part of his career. He soaked in low taverns, and 
too often could only get out of them with a lurch. 
One in particular, "The Black-Jack," which was 
very much to his taste, was demolished many years 
ago when Clare Market was swept out of existence. 
Savage knew it, and perhaps Johnson ; Turpin 
and Sheppard certainly left unpaid scores on its 
slate. 

When the artist was captured by the teetotallers, 
greatly to the improvement of his manners — his 
gift of caricature seemed to become part of the 
spoil. He never realized his loss, for to the last he 
gloried in the reformation without realizing its 
effects. He ostentatiously drank Thames from the 
tap at public banquets, and sometimes made him- 
self up, with his dinner-napkin twisted round his 
brow, into a travesty of his old and wicked self. 
The pilgrim to the shrine of his house in the Hamp- 
stead Road, was taken up to his study to see and 
smell the old foul pipe he had smoked in his state 
of sin, the battered pewter from which he had 
quaffed his beer. For all that the work of his 
period of redemption was the sorriest stuff — wit- 
ness the appalling picture which he bequeathed to 
The National Gallery, much to its consternation, 
and which had to be hidden away in the cellars 
after a brief career in the light of day. His subject 
was the curse of the drinking habit, from the cradle 
to the grave. The scheme of composition was a 
sort of chess-board with a moral against alcohol in 



VICTORIAN LONDON 265 

every square. You began with a christening scene 
— the family party toasting the child's health on 
the return from church. Next came godfather's 
silver mug, filled with devil's brew, mild at the 
start, as a moral against the temptations of boy- 
hood. Early manhood and the festive board was 
the subject of the next compartment. Middle age 
and the tortures of gout took their turn, and so on, 
until you came to a suggestion at least of a wind 
up in spontaneous combustion for the final scene. 
It was pitifully poor from first to last, without a 
trace of the old quality of his touch. 

I am quite aware that years before that, and 
still belonging to his age of repentance, his series of 
etchings called The Bottle, or the Drunkard' s Fate 
had something of the old fire. But the difference 
was due to the fact that he was then in his period 
of struggle and occasional lapse, and that his 
angel of darkness was still giving the other one a 
pretty hard time. 

Watts-Dunton's exceedingly well-meant atten- 
tions entailed much the same consequences on his 
most distinguished inmate. Swinburne was no 
doubt sorely in need of them, from the point of 
view of civilized and decent society, for he had 
sometimes suffered himself to become the butt of 
the meanest of mankind. I remember once declin- 
ing an invitation to see him in his hour of weakness, 
offered to me by a creature whom, in his sober 
senses, he would hardly have recognized with a 
nod, if he had been able to recognize him at all. 
Watts-Dunton changed all this, and in his quiet 
home at The Pines gave his friend the dignity of 



266 MY HARVEST 

surroundings suited to his standing in society and 
to his position in Hterature. 

The reformation was complete and absolute. 
The day was laid out as it is laid out in the monas- 
tery, and to complete the likeness, the meal was 
often eaten in silence. When it was over, if the 
occasional guest at luncheon was to the poet's 
liking — and nobody was invited without his per- 
mission — he unbent charmingly in talk about 
literature at large, and in the display of choice 
pieces from his fine collection of old editions. The 
best part of the day was for its close, when host and 
guest, and later on the host's charming wife, spent 
the quiet evening together, rarely, I believe, with a 
single visitor from the outside. The change from 
the Swinburne of the earlier days was nothing less 
than a metamorphosis of the old type. He was a 
new being. 

But for him, I think, Watts-Dunton would have 
extended his interest to the literature of the day. In 
his view, Swinburne not only closed the Victorian 
cycle, but left no successor, and I think that in his 
heart of hearts he drew another line of the same 
sort in regard to his own critical labours. The 
immediate present was simply red ruin and the 
breaking up of laws. 

Until age and growing infirmities consigned him 
to the retirement of his own home he was the most 
delightful companion for all who had the privilege 
of his friendship. He was often a visitor at our 
house when I lived with the Corkrans in Mecklen- 
burgh Square ; but, on the strict condition that 
we should bar all other hospitality for that night, 



VICTORIAN LONDON 267 

he gave us of his best. He was a bit of an egoist, 
not of himself exactly, but rather of the entire past 
to which he belonged. All Aylwin — his last work 
of importance, and with the giants of early Victoria 
for its characters — was implicit in his talk. The 
book is unintelligible without a key, but with it 
you get access to the Victorian age in its day of 
power. He was of that little circle of which Whistler 
was the brightest ornament, and he seemed to feel 
that nothing of note had happened since " Jimmy " 
ceased to make salads and epigrams, and kept his 
flatterers on their good behaviour with the sharp- 
ness of his tongue. 

Swinburne was in every way better for his new 
environment, in peace and dignity of life, but 
it cannot be denied that the change marked a 
diminution of his powers. The best belonged 
to the period of his wild youth before the arch- 
reformer of genius had taken him in hand. 



CHAPTER XIX 
LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 

THE transition between these and the Mid- 
Victorians proper came in, I think, with 
Stevenson. But I did not know how transitional 
he was till I came to London and studied him 
on his own soil. In a foreign country an English 
book is but an importation smacking of the voyage 
and the change of temperature. For the perfect 
flavour, you want the very air of the place of 
origin. Let Tauchnitz do what he may, Pickwick 
under the Pyramids is rather a struggle for 
atmosphere. In spite of Stevenson's bias towards 
the old literature his outlook was entirely fresh. 
I began to realize how much had passed since 
Charles Reade was the newest thing in romance. 
" Yet it moves " is as true of literature as of the 
sphere. Compare a philosophic novel of Voltaire 
with one of Henry James : the former a mere 
didactic principle that could have been stated 
in two lines, with no more construction than a 
steel chain, nor of character than a box of chess- 
men, the latter a triple distillation of both in sweet 
and fanciful thought. 

Though a cosmopolitan, James is still hard to 
understand without his British setting. Even in 
the more purely American work, he is still the 
Briton studying a foreign type. I remember a 

268 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 269 

chat with him at the club in which I asked him 
as a kind of favom' to cross to America, and to 
stand and dehver on the question : " How do 
you hke our country, sir ? " He did go there 
shortly after, as we know, and with precious 
results, but I claim no rights in the happy thought. 
I was afterwards indebted for piquant, if only 
commonplace, particulars of his life and work to 
a rather rather famous lion hunter of the other 
sex, who had stalked him at Rye with a letter of 
introduction. She reported on him as a peri- 
patetic of dictation to a shorthand writer, with 
occasional lapses to the sofa or the arm-chair. 
He trod his subject for its innermost juices, and 
occasionally, as with the other wine pressers, 
was glad to mop his brow when his task was done. 
I give it as I had it, and I am willing to admit 
there was a tinge of malice in it as, on her own 
admission, he did not take kindly to the intrusion. 
"As for his style," she said, " well, he reminds me 
of the — how do you call it ? you know what ; 
and yet there are not even two Incomprehensibles 
— in this case — but only one, for there could be 
no double of Henry James." 

Kipling came upon me as a glorious innovator — 
the Empire in the, till then unconsidered trifle of 
its maker, the common man. This brought us 
abreast of the time with its sense of the poetry of 
steam and electricity, and its power to make a 
stoker's fire-shovel as picturesque as any implement 
in Homer. It still atones for all later aberrations 
when society persuaded him that he was a prophet 
on a mount. 



270 MY HARVEST 

I met him but once, at a grand dinner given by 
Mr. A. P. Watt, the Literary Agent, to his young 
men. Watt was the Moses who brought the success- 
ful person of letters out of Grub Street, and put 
him in line with the merchant prince for results. 
Pope managed to get ten thousand out of his 
Iliad, but it was only the exception that proved 
the rule of poverty and neglect. How many 
thousands of writers have had to part with master- 
pieces for a song to the Lintots of their time ! 
Think of the long procession of them with toil, 
envy, want, and all the rest of it, for their portion, 
till this genial wolf of the trade, — for Watt had 
graduated in a publisher's office — saw there was 
business to be done by going over to the lambs. 
Think of Dickens, with his ever victorious start, 
yet glad to pledge himself for future masterpieces 
at a trifle in three figures, and still a loser in highest 
possibles when Forster had procured some sort of 
revision of the terms. But for Watt or his followers 
in the field, the Kiplings, the Barries, the Bennetts, 
and Wells might to-day have been in the same 
plight, or worse. " There he goes," groaned a 
victim of the old system, " on a penny 'bus ride to 
Paternoster Row, with a manuscript in his pocket, 
and a small fortune for his own share." 

The very pugilists have their agents now, and 
Carpentier enters the ring with the certainty, win 
or lose, of an endowment for his night's work. 
Though Tom Sayers had his modest annuity, and 
his little six-roomer in Camden Town all to him- 
self, it was due to the public generosity. Most of 
the veterans of that craft were glad to haunt 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 271 

the sporting taverns for their drinks, and their 
free lunches of bread and cheese munched minus 
the teeth lost in the service. The very poets 
and stars of the earlier music-halls had no better 
prospect, until the agent came to their aid, to 
enable the author of " Hi-tiddly-hi-ti," and " If 
you want to know the time ask a p'liceman " to 
die a fundholder. 

It was all new to me as a returned prodigal of 
opportunity, and I settled down to the sheer 
enjoyment of it, leaving the moral to take care of 
itself. London, London, the mighty and the rare ! 
that was enough — a cinema effect of figures in 
lightning movement across the screen, out of 
nothingness for a moment's joy of life, and back 
to it again within the second, the best image of 
the whole course of man. A crumb of mellow 
cheese under the microscope may be offered 
as a variant, for the spectacle of a feverish energy 
of being to no particular end or aim. 

I wrote a little here and there by way of getting 
a foothold, and soon joined the editorial staff of 
The Daily News. Frank Hill was then in the 
chair. Though with scant leisure for other work, 
he had to his credit a volume on the leading writers 
and politicians of the day, laboured with a some- 
what too manifest art for epigram and point. 
Chained to his desk, he seemed to shiver at all 
contact with the outside world, and he had the 
nervousness and irritability of his state of isolation. 
There was a legend in the office of a tiff between 
him and Pigott — not the other one, of course — 
but in his later years Examiner of Plays. Pigott, 



272 MY HARVEST 

then a leader writer for the paper, was of the same 
sensitive cast as his chief, who on this occasion 
had put him to the torture of a snub. He said 
nothing at the time but walked straight to his 
room, only to return in a few minutes to breathe 
this through the half-opened door. " Hill, I 
think it right to tell you that I consider your last 
observation uncalled for." " Oh, do you ? " 
groaned Hill in the same dead-and-alive tone. 
" Yes," gasped Pigott with another prodigious 
effort ; and the incident was closed. So we ex- 
change cartels of defiance in these degenerate 
times. It is still the common note. Formidable 
in print, with the whole armoury of attack and 
defence at command, writers are often nothing 
without their pens. A child shall lead them ; 
and happily its mother almost invariably does. 
Hill was a journalistic recluse, with a sole concern 
for the interest of his literary columns. When the 
three leaders and the reviews were off his mind, 
the rest was left to the sub-editor with but two or 
three men under his command. The order of 
importance has since been entirely reversed. The 
sub-editor as newsgatherer is now the chief authority, 
and the literature has to take care of itself. 

Hill had Herbert Paul on his staff : and prided 
himself on successful overtures to Andrew Lang. 
Both were wonders, Paul chiefly in politics, Lang 
in everything but that, for he had no sympathy 
with the policy of the paper. Paul was a Balliol 
man of the Jowett group, with all the savagery of 
Swift in his style, and much of his power. He 
was widely and deeply read in modern as in ancient 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 273 

literature, and he had a prodigious memory which 
he cultivated by never taking a note. He dipped 
his quill in a liquid fortified, I suspect, with a dash 
of vitriol, and went his way without an erasure. 
At a moment's notice he could give a sympathetic 
estimate of a great writer in the whole range of 
his work, or make out, for a political opponent, a 
passport to the shades for future use, with marks 
of identification omitting no single particular 
of turpitude. His health finally broke down 
under the strain of a series of historical works 
written too closely to time, yet showing not the 
slightest trace of it in craftsmanship. 

Lang was another person of the same, and 
perhaps even a wider range, matching the versa- 
tility of the players in Hamlet. His touch was 
feathery in its lightness, if his social satire was 
not always in the happy mean of urbanity and 
good nature. He was of the few who write with 
as much ease as they are read with pleasure. I 
have known him get his subject from Hill, and 
there and then sit down at the corner of the table 
to turn out his leader well within the hour. When 
it was done, he gathered up his slips from the floor, 
and without a glance of revision sent them upstairs 
to the printer. This, as also I imagine the readiness 
of Paul, came from the familiarity with great 
studies. His leaders and fancies were but chips 
from the workshop in which he had fashioned 
his thoughts on history, philosophy, folklore and 
what not during the earlier part of the day. His 
journalism was but a by-product, yet in more 
ways than one, it sometimes exceeded the value 



274 MY HARVEST 

of the staple. His letters, as I once took occasion 
to say, had the same charm of spontaneity. They 
came from a storehouse of often, in my judgment, 
wrong-headed opinions, which he cherished mainly 
for the sake of their picturesque charm. He was 
not a Scotch Tory for nothing — and I fancy that 
would have been his label in a confession of faith. 
" I could prophesy if I cared," he once wrote 
to me. He seemed to think that ours was, and 
always would be, a horrid rough-and-tumble sort 
of a world, with its only solace in art for life's 
sake. World-bettering on the big scale was futile, 
and only made you bad company. 

He seemed to dread boredom above all other 
things. Chance acquaintance met at dinner, 
hostesses who wanted to use him as a nice man 
for afternoon tea, found him trying. He would 
slip away from the front drawing-room with its 
buzz, on pretence of looking at a picture in the 
antechamber, and thence make his escape. 

His treatment of an unfortunate American 
who got him to dinner, white tie and all, at *' The 
Cheshire Cheese " went quite beyond the bounds. 
It was in the Dog Days too ; and as one master- 
piece after another of that robust cuisine came 
upon the board — steak, potatoes in their jackets, 
tankards of stout in which you might almost have 
stood a knife upright, with hissing hot toasted 
Cheddar to follow, he waived them with a squeaking 
" What is this ? " which carried dismay to us all. 
It was horrid, but I am ashamed to say it was 
still sport of a kind. Its culmination came when 
the host, fresh from his guide-book, explained 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 275 

that this was the favourite fare of Dr. Johnson. 
" Dr. Johnson — who was he ? " was the merciless 
parting shot. 

In his day, and to the last in his own way, he 
was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen. 
There was so much distinction in the face ; and, 
when its time came, the snow-cap of grey hair 
was an added charm for the lofty brow. He was 
of a most melancholy cast in his innermost re- 
cesses of being ; and his boundless activities were 
but resolute attempts to make the best of a bad 
job — existence. He was no tuft-hunter, yet I 
think he sometimes suffered lords beyond the 
requirements of the case. His translations are 
among his masterpieces. What must he have 
thought of our modern Samuel Butler's Homer 
with its deliberate jog-trot of colloquialisms for 
the talk of the skies ! or of Mr. Masefield's 
Poinpey the Great as the dignity of history in 
drama ? He was of the few who broke a vic- 
torious lance with Anatole France. He would not 
have his Joan of Arc explained away on theories 
of hallucination, or of suggestion by priestly 
fraud. 

Such was the team in the old days. Many 
changes were to come in the course of transition 
to the new ha'penny model of our time. This 
has been marked in a way by the passing of the 
editor of the old type. The new one is no longer, 
of necessity at least, a scholarly recluse, he is a 
man of the world. His three leaders are reduced 
to one and a few scrappy paragraphs. His sub- 
editor has in a manner supplanted him by learning 



276 MY HARVEST 

to let the facts in their dressing speak for them- 
selves. This artificer forms opinion by suggestion 
and enables his reader to say ' I told you so ' 
without knowing that he has himself been told. 
His room, which used to be one of the smallest 
in the office, is now comparable in size and the 
number and multitudinous activities of the staff, 
to the kitchen of a big hotel. Add to this that 
the departments have been increased beyond the 
dreams of the past. There is a huge contingent 
for illustration, staffed with all the labour, artistic 
and mechanical, belonging to that branch of the 
work — draughtsmen for the sketches, craftsmen for 
the production of the plates. So, while this is 
still the newest thing in one way, in another, as 
picture writing, it is a reversion to the youth of 
the world. All the old work had to be done by the 
pen : Senior's descriptions were literature. 

The library again is an integral part of the 
equipment. In the earlier time the leader writer 
had to carry all his information in his own head. 
Paul could do it, but then his was the head of 
Paul. The books of reference might almost be 
counted on the fingers. Wilson, so long the main- 
stay of The Times, told me that the only thing 
of the kind in his room at the office was an Army 
List, and that several years out of date. In these 
days, whatever the topic, you have only to touch 
a bell, and you are instantly furnished with all 
the information bearing on your subject from a 
miniature British Museum on the premises. And 
there is this to the good, it is information brought 
down to the very day of writing. The librarian. 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 277 

often a young woman, is an Atlas staggering 
under the burden of a world of reference, and 
understood to be ready to resign or to commit 
suicide at a moment's notice, on failure to meet 
all demands at sight. 

I did my best in my own behoof with a small 
amateurish collection of my own. When E. T. 
Cook came into the succession of the editorship, 
he continued the same plan from his own previous 
practice, and we exchanged good offices at need. 
He was a man of the new generation, and a remark- 
able one. Given his proper supply of cigarettes, 
I think he would have been capable of writing the 
whole leader page on an emergency. I often saw 
him in a tight place : I never saw him turn a 
hair. At Oxford, I believe, he was one of the best 
Aristotelians of the time : so the drilling and the 
milling of the academical system counts, when 
the student is of the right sort. 

Newspaper work is a terrible strain till one gets 
used to it. The ordinary conditions of literary 
leisure, pleasant surroundings, the sense of the 
full possession of your own soul, are opposed to it 
in every particular. Fleet Street is never perfectly 
quiet day or night. Often you back on a slum, and 
have to take a courteous interest in its brawls. 
Slum or not, the rooms are usually bare and comfort- 
less, and the sounds and other interruptions in- 
cidental to the work of the premises are distracting 
until you have acquired the second nature of the 
calling. The too insistent ' devil ' who steals 
into your room every ten minutes or so to bring 
proofs of the whole issue for your inspection as 



278 MY HARVEST 

they are pulled, and to take copy sheet by sheet 
as you write, is a bit of a trial till you get used 
to him. The ' reader ' who occasionally descends 
from above to ask you to verify a quotation, or to 
suggest an emendation, is another. Mine was 
more welcome, for he rarely took his departure 
without offering a pinch of snuff. The type is 
usually a venerable person with a manner suggestive 
of better days and higher hopes in the work of the 
pen ; his out-of-the-way erudition is sometimes 
quite remarkable. There are moments when you 
could fain ask him to linger and tell you of his 
past ; but after all he is still one interruption 
more. For another, there is the distant but still 
quite audible throb of the engines, as a preliminary 
to the work of going to press. 

Writing is almost impossible till you have got 
the better of these trials, and you will never attain 
to the mastery if you begin late, or let yourself 
drop out of training. Poor Davidson, a man of 
letters if ever there was one, went all to pieces 
as a journalist under a mishap of the latter kind. 
He once came to the office as a locum tenens in 
holiday time, and with distressing results. The 
place was new to him, the conditions were dis- 
tracting, he was unable to write a line. The demon 
boy came and went, and still all that awaited him 
was the sight of a miserable fellow creature with 
his hands in his hair, and a welter of torn beginnings 
on the floor. 

Presently, of course on information received, 
the editor dropped in with a cheery ' how are you 
going on ? ' 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 279 

Not very well. 

Ah, just the want of the habit of it, but you'll 
soon get used 

If you don't mind, I think I won't stay. 

" They're of no mortal use to you," he said, as 
he decamped, with a handful of his failures in his 
pocket, " but they might come in handy for a 
novel on the Press." 

The whole staff is now mobilized for instant 
action at any point of the compass. Speed is the 
first requisite, and with speed, strangely enough, 
has come more leisure than of old. We toiled 
through our task into the small hours, often enough 
with midnight for our starting-point. Nowadays 
they must be almost ready to go to press at that 
hour, so as to have the paper served with the hot 
rolls, in most parts of the kingdom. Mere fast 
trains have long been superseded, though they 
still play their part. Much of it is wired down to 
branch centres in the chief towns, every important 
word winged for its flight to the farthest confines 
of the system as it falls from the pen. We old 
stagers had the sense of holiday, if we managed 
to get away before two in the morning, when we 
staggered forth to our cabs at the door, to take 
a first instalment of sleep on the way home. As 
often as not, our cabman slept too, trusting to 
Providence and his own latent powers for emer- 
gencies. 

Each of us had his own particular man for the 
drive. I once took the liberty of remonstrating 
with mine on the risks of collision with the market 
carts taking the opposite course to ours, their 



280 MY HARVEST 

drivers wholly regardless of rules of the road as 
they lurched in slumber on their shafts. 

" It's like this," he said. " 'Ow many years 'ave 
I drove you, and 'ave I ever spilt you onst ? " 

I had to leave it there until " onst " — I lived 
in Kensington then — the hansom came into 
collision with the refuge at the top of St. James's 
Street, and turned neatly over on its side. We 
were rescued by one of the night birds always at 
hand in London. " I see it comin'," he said — 
" but I was a bit too late ; you was on the hobe- 
lisk " — his generic name for anything placed by 
authority in the middle of the road — " before I 
could give your chap the tip." To this day, 
I believe, an obelisk in honour of a deceased 
alderman is still used as a refuge in Farringdon 
Street. 

" What do you think of yourself now ? " I asked 
the cabman. 

" 'Ow many years 'ave I drove Well, it 

won't 'appen again." 

And, with my active co-operation, it never did. 

Strangely enough, though the glass was shivered 
to fragments, neither of us was a penny the worse. 
Even Providence had been caught napping, but 
had roused itself in time to make amends. 

His successor was always in the highest spirits, 
and whistled all the way home. I never saw a 
more cheerful man. As he told me in confidence, 
he was getting on. I was only one of his regular 
customers : " Mr. Phil May — the gentleman what 
does the pictures for the papers " — was another ; 
and often gave him a sovereign for his fare as he 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 281 

made the tour of the night clubs. " He starts 
just as you leave off : you know — ' Box and Cox ' : 
you've seen that I dessay. I'm beginning to save, 
I am ; and by and by I'll buy a cab and a gee-gee 
or two, and be my own master." He achieved 
them bit by bit and whistled louder than ever. 
Then one day, while acting as his own stableman, 
he had his leg badly broken by a kick from one of 
his horses, and got lamed for life. The long illness 
brought him down with a run ; he was sold up, 
and he had to decline to a " growler " owing to 
the impossibility of mounting the higher box — 
the growler and wage servitude. After that he 
whistled no more. 

All so well and truly tried, and all so frustrated. 
The mystery of the luck ! 

Sir John Robinson was the master of us all in 
Bouverie Street. He was at first only the manager, 
though he afterwards became titular editor. As 
between him and the nominal chief it was long 
a question of conflict of jurisdictions, like that 
between the Mikado and the Shogun. He ruled 
by suggestion, scouring the news of the day for 
topics for Lang, and promoting without commanding 
suitable subjects for the rest. His pride was that 
he knew a handy man when he saw one, and an- 
nexed him as soon as he could. He discovered 
Archibald Forbes, when the latter, while languishing 
for a job equal to his powers, was glad to become 
correspondent for The Morning Advertiser at the 
outbreak of the Franco-German war. Our manager 
was still busy with the question of getting him into 
the net, when one day up came his card for an 



282 MY HARVEST 

interview. " The Lord hath dehvered him into 
my hand," muttered Robinson, and he was engaged 
at once. The result was the finest work in that 
branch of journaHsm ever seen since the golden 
prime of Russell of The Times. 

Forbes was an ex-dragoon, in one of his attributes 
as a rolling stone, and he never lost that trace of his 
origin. His manners were those of the barrack- 
room, but genius atoned for all. He knew how to 
get there, the supreme gift of a writer working in 
the rough-and-tumble of war. He wrote, as they 
all have to do, sitting, standing, or lying down, 
with a drum-head for a table, or at need the saddle 
of his horse. And when he had written he knew 
how to get first in with his copy. His rivals in the 
field might be as quick as himself with the pen, 
but they had no other resource than to wait for 
the transmission of their despatches until the 
military people had done with the wires. Forbes 
saw a better way ; Luxemburg was on the frontier 
of the scene of fighting, and its wires were disen- 
gaged. He made straight for that quarter after 
every battle, often riding all night to do it, and 
beat the field. In work of this kind, an hour 
sometimes counts in priority, and four-and-twenty, 
or even twelve, make an eternity. He was ably 
seconded at the office. Robinson slept there half 
the time, to await the despatch, and at need to 
bring it out at once. The result was fame for 
the writer, a circulation of leaps and bounds for 
the paper — sorely in need of it — and a modest 
fortune for the arch-contriver in the managerial 
chair. 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 283 

He was content to be a contriver, an efficient 
cause to the last, without a thought of the honours 
of notoriety. He knew, and that was enough for 
him. His eyes twinkhng behind his spectacles, 
he sat tight in his office chair, and judged men 
and events. His one infirmity was that he never 
could tell where he had left the spectacles, after 
removing them but a moment before. A smart 
lad in his antechamber found a vocation that was 
something of a sinecure in restoring them to their 
owner. His heart was as good as his head, a true 
friend, a genial companion, a lover of the good 
story and the quip and crank for his leisure hour. 
If he had any other weakness it was the belief 
that a diary, which he had kept for the better 
part of his career, was charged with secrets of 
state unpublishable in his lifetime, and only 
to be printed with caution after his death. He 
seemed to tremble at the thought of the dangerous 
nature of its revelations. It made its appearance 
in due course, but without disturbing the peace 
of politicians or even contributing to the gaiety 
of nations in any marked way. This is easily 
accounted for. The secrets of to-day are the 
only things that count as curiosity and wonder ; 
to-morrow they have only the interest of ancient 
history. Fresh from a cabinet minister's room, 
Robinson might justly fear that he carried high 
explosives enough to ruin a government, if they 
happened to catch. As it was, their too long 
storage in the magazine of his diary often failed 
to bring them to the flash-point of the interest of 
anecdote. 



284 MY HARVEST 

He was the first to use the wires extensively — 
with an anathema on the consequences. For 
long years they were regarded by the Press as a 
costly luxury, and no wonder when every message 
was charged at prohibitory rates. Renter partly 
remedied this in introducing a system of joint 
service for matters of common interest. He saw 
that, in many things, what would serve for one 
paper might serve as well for a hundred, with a 
consequent cheapening to the customers. 

Robinson had a good story of the way in which 
the enterprise was launched in this country. Renter 
went to The Daily News as to the other leading 
papers, with an offer of copious and trustworthy 
telegrams from abroad on this plan. 

The manager naturally asked for terms. 

" Nothing," said Renter, genially, and I believe 
sounding it with a " d." 

" Come ! come ! that will never do — what do 
you expect to get out of it ? " 

" The esteem of the British people, whom I 
admire." 

" Humph ! you may send 'em in." 

They came, they were worth printing, and 
they duly appeared on those extraordinary terms 
in every important journal. At the end of the 
year they had become indispensable, and then 
the philanthropist called again. 

You like my little telegrams ? 

Undoubtedly. 

Well, I want to arrange about going on with 
them. 

Very pleased, I am sure. 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 285 

My terms are a thousand a year. 

Whew ! that's a very different story from the 
one you 

" Ah ! " said the other quietly, " we are talking 
business now." 

And he got his thousand all round. To refuse 
would have been .to have given priority to a host 
of rivals. 

No wonder the capitalist has learned to think 
himself indispensable to the Press, when every 
new departure involves expenditure at this rate. 
When I see how the newspaper is staffed, from 
the commissioner at the door to the editor in his 
shrine, I think with awe of the bewildering frac- 
tion of the incoming ha'penny, even with the 
grant in aid, of the advertisements, for the 
average share. The hundreds who want their 
mite ! The huge sub-editorial staff ; the clouds of 
skirmishing reporters and interviewers ; the illus- 
trators, caricaturists, cartographers, and printers ; 
the resident correspondents abroad in their costly 
offices, to say nothing of the specials at the front 
with their mounts and their motor-cars. With 
that all the agency of distribution, from Smith 
and Son down to the urchin who calls his wares 
in the street, and the goody at the chandler's shop 
who works them in with the bacon and the brandy 
balls. The head spins with it, as under some 
new illustration of the problem of the indivisibility 
of matter. Is there no chance for the mere human 
being with the sense of a message, and nothing in 
his pocket ? 

In such difficulties one takes to day-dreaming 



286 MY HARVEST 

as the only resource. I have done that in one of 
my books where I imagine a man with httle more 
in the way of worldly gear than what he stands 
upright in, yet determined to try his luck as a 
founder. He fastens on a neighbourhood of mean 
streets, and resolves to tell the truth about it for 
good and ill — his premises a back garret ; his 
plant a cheap duplicating machine for manuscript. 
Nothing of public moment in that neighbourhood 
escapes him, in its crimes, vices, labours, privations, 
heroisms — the home, the gin-shop, the charitable 
agencies, too often with their spurns that patient 
merit of the unworthy takes from the underlings 
at their gates, the district visitors, the parson on 
the prowl for souls. Well, he makes that microcosm 
hum ; and presently his single sheet at a ha'penny 
— or at the price of a farthing epic, if you like — 
becomes a second necessary of life to many of its 
inmates, and to an ever-widening circle of the 
great world outside, to whom he sends it free for 
a time on probation. It is a dead loss at first, 
but what with his dietary of oatmeal and 
potatoes, and his soul never failing in its purpose, 
it slowly begins to pay out-of-pocket expenses. 
The next stage is a fount of broken type, and a 
handpress. By and by, still with all the serious 
labours of production and distribution manipu- 
lated on the system of a one-man show, he feels 
justified in adding an urchin to the staff. The 
daring of it, the individuality, is the charm ; it 
is at least a voice in our wilderness and no echo. 
After a while the big brothers, the leviathans of 
the ordinary issues, get wind of it and write it up 



LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM 287 

as a jest, if only in the hope of writing it down. 
The sociologist looks in to inquire ; the circulation 
widens, the front garret is added to the back, and 
so until a gas engine rises to the occasion, and 
finally with the help of a whole battery of Hoes, 
all bought out of profits, we attain to a largest 
circulation, on the pure merits of our leading 
contributor. Truthful James, with never a trick 
of the trade to help us out. Our office lamp has 
become the brightest thing on the orb, and is 
distinctly recognizable from the Milky Way. 

The rich investor may look in if he likes, but 
only with his ha'penny for his copy, and, by pre- 
ference, his hat in his hand. All his millions will 
never buy an interest in it, in the sense of a directing 
voice. The idea is that there may be as good a 
chance as ever for the small man, if he knows how 
to set to work. The older and the better way was 
to end with capital, not to begin with it ; it is a 
mere hot-water bottle at the best. 

My dream is out. To make no secret of it, I 
came to London to do something like this, but I 
wasn't man enough for the job. The poor com- 
promise of John Street was all that remained. 



CHAPTER XX 
CLUBS 

MEN'S clubs are the milestones of their life 
course, but it is as well to wait to the last 
before you judge the career. The old-fashioned 
way was to begin with the Bohemian, go on to the 
Respectable, and thence, if it could be managed, 
to the Ineffable of Pall Mall. 

I knew The Savage in its mellowest, and to my 
mind, most delightful hour when it was in the 
large room under the Piazza at Covent Garden. 
Its second stage was the Savoy. In its third and 
present at Adelphi Terrace, I was not a member, 
but only an occasional guest. 

The Whitefriars, never more than a dining club, 
was my middle course. It had its day in Bohemia, 
but reorganized as it is now, it is something of a 
debating society tempered by a dinner. There is 
a subject for discussion, and a " celebrity," usually 
from the outside, as the opener. Its only blemish 
in the nature of the case is that it is sometimes a 
little too improving for the mind, to the exclusion 
of all chance of exchanging a word with one's 
neighbour. Every human being is a speech-maker, 
under suitable conditions — the platform, the chim- 
ney corner, the tea-table, or the smoking-room. 
Few, however, are able to respond with perfect 

288 



CLUBS 289 

self-possession to the call of "legs." The Club of 
Boswell's mighty theme must still be our best 
model for all time. It was an age of conversation, 
and the subject settled itself by natural selection. 
Think of Johnson or Burke brought to his feet by 
a tap from a sturdy hammerman in the chair, and 
limited to five minutes for his course. The pro- 
ceedings moved at their own sweet will, and their 
no order, which was order in the highest, carried 
with it the possibility of both the grave and the 
gay. When the heavy lead threatened to be too 
ponderous, there was always Goldsmith at hand 
with his quip, or story, addled in the hatching, like 
his masterpiece in the riddle of the peas and 
Turnham Green. On rare occasions we have been 
blessed in this way at the 'Friars. I hope I shall 
never forget the evening when Max O'Rell was in 
the chair, and Rapson, the great Orientalist, then 
at the British Museum, now an Oxford professor, 
was the guest of the evening. At the Museum he 
belonged to the department of Coins and Medals ; 
and O'Rell wanted to say something nice about him 
as a numismatist. With his imperfect knowledge of 
the niceties of our tongue, he could manage it only 
in this way : " Gentlemen, we are honoured to-night 

with the presence of a well-known coiner " 

The rest was lost in an inevitable roar, with Rapson 
as the loudest contributor. O'Rell tried to join in 
the merriment, but he was too late; it had evidently 
caught him unawares. 

These difficulties have lately suggested to some 
few lovers of the older model a Fireside Club; 
limited in numbers to a round dozen, and without 



290 MY HARVEST 

a programme of any sort. We have good talk — 
mainly about our common shop of the arts, in 
their setting of the incidents of the time. For 
perfection in this line you must have the round 
table : anything with corners favours button- 
holing and particularism. We are working up to 
that piece of furniture, but it is no easy thing to 
find in sufficient size. We were after the very last 
in Wardour Street, when it was snapped up by a 
gang of politicians. You could have played cricket 
on it. It was a beauty, and it bore a mark which, 
the vendor assured us, was that of the cabinet- 
maker to the Royal Family at Camelot. We had 
our revenge ; they never met but to disagree : such 
tables are not for the likes o' them. 

A thing not to be forgotten is that the clubs 
change with the times. The Savage is not what it 
was, for one reason no doubt because it is some- 
thing better. One venerable survivor of the mem- 
bership of my day is now a model of all the proprie- 
ties, and, for aught I know to the contrary, sings 
canticles. At the Garrick, the stock-broker is no 
longer a pariah. 

The Reform Club, when I joined, was in its old 
age. It had outlived the almost revolutionary 
impulses of its origin, and had cooled far more 
rapidly than the globe. Its typical member was 
very well satisfied with reforms as they stood, on 
the conviction that there had been change enough 
to last as long as the eyesight of healthy vision. 
Its still more typical group sat for luncheon at a 
small table that just held five for comfort, Robin- 
son, James Payn and Black the novelists, " Joe " 



CLUBS 291 

Parkinson, and Wemyss Reid. If there happened 
to be a vacant place, and it was rashly appropriated 
by an unwary freshman, the head waiter looked 
troubled, while the others sent the intruder, or, 
at need, themselves, to Coventry forthwith. I 
once made this deplorable mistake, and never felt 
more uncomfortable in my life. They had all voted 
for me, and were extremely cordial in individual 
encounter, but they seemed to feel that the great 
Reform Bill itself drew the line at social conven- 
tions. It was all right with them, and I am sure 
they most sincerely hoped it was so with everybody 
else. After luncheon they either ministered to 
Payn's almost guilty passion for a rubber, or took 
— still reserved — seats round the fire in the smok- 
ing-room. The programme was as fixed and in- 
variable as the rest. Payn cut biting jests at Robin- 
son's expense, while his victim, who idolized him 
for his humour, winced, yet still chuckled with the 
thought of his fine form. Black told the latest 
story : " Bang gaed a saxpence," I believe, made 
its first appearance in London at this institution. 
So did : 

Ten little niggers drinking sherry wine, 

One tasted So-and-So's and then there were nine. 

Parkinson stood for the humour of the man 
about town. His was a curious history. He began 
as a civil servant of the old days of leisure, and 
doubled the part as one of Charles Dickens's young 
men, writing many a paper for Household Words. 
This served to launch him in journalism, and he 
joined the staff of The Daily News as a descriptive 
writer. In the course of his duties it fell to his lot 



292 MY HARVEST 

to describe the laying of an Atlantic cable. The 
chief contractor was on the cable-ship, with his 
charming daughter ; and Joe, as one of the finest 
young fellows of the day, made such good use of 
his time that, at the end of the voyage the young 
people threw themselves at the feet of the astonished 
sire, to ask his blessing on their engagement. They 
were met by a flat refusal. The parent had risen 
from the ranks by mother wit and character. His 
daughter's distress touched him with the second 
thoughts that are best, among them the considera- 
tion that Joe might be a catch in his way. After 
all he was an educated man of winning manners, 
and his accomplishments would be useful on the 
Board of Directors. The match was made, very 
much to the advantage of both sides. Joe rose to 
his opportunities, became a capitalist, and had a 
son in the Guards. If there is any way of going 
beyond that in aspiration, I should like to hear 
of it. 

He was a great authority on eating and drink- 
ing ; and he and his bosom friend Edmund Yates 
rendered each other a strange kind of mutual 
service in studies of that sort. They were mighty 
diners-out, but they knew the risk, especially at 
public dinners. Who was to answer for the wines ? 
It was therefore agreed between them that each 
should alternately make the first experiment, so 
that if anything went amiss, there might be one 
survivor. The taster of the hour sipped, while his 
friend waited and watched ; and according to his 
nod or shake of the head, the other fell to or 
abstained. 



CLUBS 293 

Yates was not of the club, but Parkinson often 
served that institution, in much the same way. 
He excogitated new dishes, and tried them with 
the help of a chosen band. Once, when there hap- 
pened to be much talk of the simple life, they 
attempted a dinner from a bill of fare of our fore- 
fathers preserved in that curious book Walker's 
Original. It consisted I believe of a little fish, a 
little roast, with a remove of game, a tart and a 
kickshaw. They saw their great man in the 
kitchen about it : and entering heartily into the 
project he did his best. But when they had finished, 
all had to join in sorrowful confession that they 
had not dined. The Reform survives in the repu- 
tation of its cookery ; and in other respects it may 
easily boast of going one more on the Carlton next 
door. 

In striking contrast to these there was occa- 
sionally the august figure of John Bright, less in 
its effect and actual presence than a memory of an 
earlier and a greater time. After his split with the 
Liberal Party on the question of Home Rule, he 
seemed to sit in a proud isolation of his own 
choosing, for there were plenty to bear him com- 
pany. His appearance seemed to call the smoking- 
room to order, and he often came and went without 
other companionship than his paper and his cigar. 

"Labby" was another member of note, though 
towards the latter end of his career his favourite 
resort was rather that club of all clubs, under the 
clock tower at Westminster. Here, especially 
when he was playing the part of Achilles in his tent, 
after the tiff with Mr Gladstone, he was the life 



294 MY HARVEST 

and soul of the place. His cynical humour found 
vent in teaching the young Tories, who adored him, 
how to put spokes in the wheel of the Liberal 
machine. " What are you fellows about ? Why 
don't you ask a question about — so and so — and 
floor the lot ? " When he heard a good story 
against the Government he would croak gleefully : 
" I must go and tell that to my cobblers at North- 
ampton " — who adored him to the end. 

The National Liberal was my next stage, in 
political clubs. Of this, again, one may say " it 
moves," as a register of the heart-beats of Radical 
England. 

The most interesting clubs of another kind are 
those like the Omar Khayyam, of which you hear 
very little beyond the walls. It dines once a 
quarter or so, pays homage, rubrical and poetic, 
to the Master, and then makes haste to forget him 
in talk about things in general, flavoured by a sort 
of ritualistic humour generally turning on the mis- 
deeds of the committee or of particular members. 
This imports a butt, and that office is filled by a 
genial victim now almost the titular holder. Many 
men, well known in science, the arts, the higher 
Civil Service and what not, meet here to unbend. 
The proceedings are brought into keeping with the 
philosophy of the Eastern teacher by a tone of 
genial pessimism that runs all through. Whence 
and Whither ? Who knows ? But since you are 
here, you can't do better than make the best of it. 
" A cup of wine," at least, to cheer us ; if not 
" Thou ! " 

A curious club that is still not a club is to be 



CLUBS 295 

found in a sort of movable feast, held once a year, 
by a loving disciple of the author of Erewhon. It 
convenes only just as the spirit moves the disciple 
to call writers and others together to talk on Butler 
and his work. It has some affinity with those 
Chinese committees whose business it is to promote 
deserving persons to a post among the constella- 
tions. The idea is that Butler was a great fore- 
runner and pathfinder in the realism of modern 
literature, and that if you sweep the poet's corner 
of the skies assiduously, you will find him seated 
there in his immortality of glory. I have heard 
very good speaking at this board. 

The English clubs, as a rule, differ from the 
French in one important point. Ours tends to 
give you only the raw material of association — a 
place to meet in — and to eat in, leaving the rest 
to take care of itself. The French club generally 
feels bound to provide also the means of amuse- 
ment. I take as a type the Union Artistique — the 
Mirlitons for short — most French clubs have a 
nickname. It is for artists and men of letters, but 
that is only the beginning of it. What are you 
going to do with them and for them when they are 
on your hands ? Hence endless devices and an 
overworked committee — plays in a properly ap- 
pointed bijou theatre, written, staged and acted 
by members, except for the contingent of leading 
actresses from the outside ; exhibitions of pictures 
painted by members, concerts staffed by members, 
lectures, dances, and so on. The fogey has to be 
pretty smart sometimes to get his chance of a 
nap. 



296 MY HARVEST 

In my day you found the British model at the 
old Union, where they had played whist daily since 
the time of Talleyrand. Their cold shoulder — not 
of mutton but of manners — might almost have put 
the Athenaeum to shame. 

The two national styles in club fellowship are 
just as sharply contrasted in eating and drinking. 
How feebly does an ordinary British club rise to 
its opportunities with the potato. We know the 
infinite variety of the French genius, in its applica- 
tion to the treatment of this vegetable. As for 
green things, who but an Englishman could have 
achieved the almost savage simplicity of boiled 
cabbage in slabs ? — perhaps the true reading for 
Nebuchadnezzar's grass of the field, though as- 
suredly importing no mitigation of his punishment. 
I once saw this delicacy offered to a Frenchman at 
an English table. His merci-non was the most 
decisive utterance I ever heard in my life. Our 
clubs for ladies are leading the way with a daintier 
fare, within the limit of their means. 



CHAPTER XXI 
SALONS 

THE mid-Victorian drawing-room is becoming a 
salon and it will be all the better for the change. 
People may now meet to talk about the things 
that are really in their minds. I could name a 
dozen places of this sort, but it would be a misuse 
of the limelight of publicity. The hostess keeps 
up with the intellectual movements of the day, 
and her pace in this proceeding never betrays the 
uniform of the blue stocking. People drop in by 
contrivance of a kind, but it is understood that 
they meet for no chronicle of small beer. There is 
even a subject — so much of purpose enters into it 
— though pains are taken to keep the note of easy 
conversation. We have still higher things to rise 
to by letting the subject determine itself by natural 
selection, as in the French model. The first con- 
dition is an instinctive sympathy with the things 
that count. This, in spontaneous utterance, 
prompted if you like by the mere news of the day, 
will do the rest. Julie de Lespinasse, we may be 
sure, and Madame du Deffand had no syllabus ; 
Hume or Alembert dropped in, and the rest 
occurred. The old coffee-houses of our Augustan 
age were our nearest approach to it, but they were 

207 



298 MY HARVEST 

limited to the men : there can be no true concert 
without the woman's note. It is certain that 
Addison, for one, wanted to introduce it ; he says 
so almost in terms. 

The best I know in this kind, and here I must, 
if only by way of exception, depart from my rule 
of naming no names, has long been the salon of 
the Meynells. It is a whole family of letters. The 
father, while the surest judge of ways and means 
in that art in all London, sometimes in his passion 
for brevity does less than full justice to his subject 
and his own powers. The mother belongs to the 
public, in spite of herself, by virtue of her work, 
and of a native distinction which has made her a 
representative woman. She has written but too 
little, for all of it bears the stamp of a highly cul- 
tured mind, and of the cosmopolitanism of wide 
sympathies. Her youth, and that of her brilliant 
sister, the painter of The Roll Call, was spent in 
Italy ; and her knowledge of Italian literature 
and Italian life makes her as much at home in 
Rome as in London, or for that matter in Boston 
of the Americans. 

She was the muse of Coventry Patmore in his 
old age, in that stage of his life a poet pretty hard to 
please with other people's work. To be fair to him 
he could at times be as hard on his own. " My only 
poem that reached the great heart of the people," 
he laughed one day, " was published in a comic 
paper (Judy I think) at the time of the Franco- 
Prussian war of the 'seventies. The King of Prussia 
was sending such pious telegrams to his wife on the 
slaughter of the French battlefields that it was 



SALONS 299 

impossible to refrain." And he solemnly declaimed, 
as memory serves, in these terms : 

Oh, just to say, my dear Augusta, 
We've had another awful buster. 
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below : 
Praise God from whom all blessings flow ! 

Everybody knew the jingle : till then, I, for one, 
never knew him for the author. 

That fastidious contact, I have often thought, 
was rather unfortunate for Mrs. Meynell. It 
accounted for a certain touch of preciosity in her 
occasional judgments which led to the exclusion 
of Grey's Elegy from her anthology of English 
verse — on the ground, I think, of its ' obviousness.' 
Yet what has made it obvious but the universality 
of appeal, which has also made it the common 
possession of our race ? For the same reason The 
Lord's Prayer labours under exactly the same dis- 
advantage. The Elegy is the true psalm of life of 
the heroic soul ; cast in a classic mould because it 
imports the attitude of that soul towards the human 
lot, in its measured and restrained melancholy, its 
fine sense of the tears of things. 

It was, I believe, the great Smelfungus of our 
time, who found Jaques on the seven ages of man, 
and Hamlet in the soliloquy a trifle commonplace, 
and was good enough to suggest improvements on 
the lines of a Fabian tract. 

The Meynells brought out the poet Francis 
Thomson, not as a show, but as a friend of the 
family, who was to be met there because he was 
long in the family care. They found him by pure 
accident in the lowest depths of the London 



300 MY HARVEST 

Bohemia, tended him, gave him the sense of what 
was due to himself. The story is well known. He 
was earning his night's lodging as a cab-tout at the 
doors of a theatre, but something told them that 
here was a genius who only wanted mothering and 
mending to take his place in the firmament. A 
copy of Homer in the original, peeping from a 
pocket, — both dog's eared — first gave them pause. 
This led to his identification as the author of a 
poem printed in a magazine under their editorship, 
with no particular clue to the circumstances of the 
author. His connection with them was, at the 
beginning, so much a family matter that for some 
time he was content with one theme, his hostess 
and her children. When he wanted to write about 
angels, he had nothing to do but single out ' Prue ' 
and ' Dimpling,' and fit them with wings — always 
most felicitously to measure. When his erratic 
ways threatened to make him a little unmanageable 
they sent him to a monastery for safe keeping. I 
have seen him, in custody of one of the fathers in 
frock and cord, brought back to town for a few 
days' probation, and frolicking it in glorious talk 
on their hearth-rug. He passes to immortality, but 
Chesterton is still there to take his place with talk 
even finer than his writing, and others of mark to 
make a House for him, if one cared to name them. 
This is the salon in its perfection, the symposium 
with the nectar of high thought for its circling 
draughts. 

Not that other beverage is entirely neglected. 
You sup there, if you get the chance, but in the 
homely way of the cold joint in cut, the salad, and 



SALONS 301 

the sweet which just serve, like the banquets in the 
Iliad, to put away from you the desire of eating and 
drinking, as a hindrance to the flow of soul. The 
daughters, married or single, are the Hebes of the 
occasion, aided at will by the guests themselves. 
To show that you love your opposite neighbour as 
yourself, you have but to pass a dish to him across 
the long narrow table, which recalls the Millais 
picture of the feast in The Pot of Basil that tells 
no small part of the story. 

In all things they live their lives exactly in their 
own way, and that I suppose is the only royal road 
to originality. One of the boys who has a taste 
for ' curios ' has established himself in what he 
calls a Serendipity Shop, on the suggestion of 
Horace Walpole's precious coinage of a word for 
the people who are constantly finding valuable 
articles by chance. Another is at Oxford and doing 
well. Olive is for art. Their modest " place " in 
Sussex for occasional retreat from the worries of 
town is a family settlement. They have bought 
a bit of land at a proper distance from the railway 
station, and dotted it with cottages for parents 
and children. As the latter reach maturity and 
housekeeping on their own account, a new home- 
stead is added to the compound, far enough for 
privacy and perfect freedom, near enough to link 
itself with the parental foundation at the heart 
of it by the smoke from its roof. They dine in 
common, or the other way, just as the fancy takes 
them. The infants are the principal go-betweens, 
scampering to and fro to keep the company well 
posted in its domestic news by a wireless of their 



302 MY HARVEST 

own. It is the life of the clan in a new setting 
suited to our time. 

Here ' Prue,' for intimacy, Viola for the Regis- 
trar-General, now writes her books. They are so 
full of the country and of fine observation of all its 
phases and its moods that I can but suspect as 
much. It is a new departure in the literature of 
fiction. They are wholly unlike anything else, but 
that is nothing : so are many poor books. These 
make a category for themselves. 

The charm, I think, comes of a simplicity, anxious 
to make a meaning clear, and therefore more or 
less innocent of conscious art in the way of putting 
it, or guilty of it only in the sense of its own short- 
comings. It is the shrewd saying with no thought 
of the epigram. With this an equally extreme sim- 
plicity in the theme. A man or two, a maid or two, 
in a medium of uneventful events — a word spoken, 
as often as not, unspoken, a commonplace of 
greeting with its intonation in the wrong place. 
A walk, a drive, a shower — anything will do, even 
tea, yet with this, perhaps, before you know any- 
thing about it, a storm of the first magnitude at 
the bottom of the cup. Taken altogether, an 
anatomy of the nerve system of the woman soul, 
and this not in its eccentricities but in its law. 
The plot, such as it is from the ordinary novel 
reader's point of view, moves on lines of emotion, 
not on lines of action ; the characters are anything 
that God has made, and the writer happens to 
have met. One hero was a mere diver by trade, 
but when his time had come, and quite in the way 
of business, he made a plunge that carried with it 



SALONS 303 

all the tragedy of a dip into the Maelstrom. One 
heroine, a servant wench, is yet of the household 
of Lear. Another, lady-help to a man of letters, 
while never missing a post or failing to verify a 
quotation, nurses a soul of fire. All the drawing 
in it is like the drawing of the new art, done, not 
with the pencil in lines, but with the brush in 
colours. Genius in a word, and as its only begetter 
little Prue, who but the other day might have been 
tossed in a railway rug, for want of a blanket, by 
the author of The Hound of Heaven. What are you 
to say about it — heredity, environment, eugenical 
evolution — fiddle-de-dee ! Say nothing, but take 
it as you find it and ask for more. 

One sometimes gets a bit cross with her, for all 
that. Columbine, the latest as yet, quite fine down 
to the last page but one — then, if you please, a 
fresh start in misunderstandings, a fresh shufile 
and cut for the choice of affinities, and the whole 
business started all over again, and not even 
written for the distracted reader, but left to him 
to work out in nightmares. The mind reels under 
' their will and their won't ' till they begin to sug- 
gest nothing more edifying than another breed 
from Mars. Human souls ought not to be handled 
in such a way as to suggest arguments against the 
abuses of vivisection. Can it be a new terror of 
the obvious in her mother's child ? 



CHAPTER XXn 

FAITHS AND UNFAITHS 

NOTHING is barred now in mere discussion. 
There is quite a run on the faiths that tend 
to make rehgion rather a philosophy than an 
ethic, and to give conduct its only imperative in 
the social proprieties. 

The newspapers take up religion as a feature ; 
the public is circularised in its thousands, with 
posers on the problems — the solutions, to be 
published, with or without your portrait, but 
with your autograph to oblige, for the facsimile. 
Mrs. Besant, caught on the wing to or from India, 
gives us a kind of paraphrase on ' all for the best 
in the best of all possible worlds,' as a new setting 
of the Theosophic confession of faith. Mr. Maske- 
lyne, labelled as ' doyen of conjurers,' gets in a 
dig at that confession. It will be woe to evildoers 
in the next world, he thinks, especially " for those, 
who for the sake of gain, concoct new religions, 
and set up false Christs and mythical Mahatmas 
to impose upon and rob the unwary." It might 
have been differently put, particularly in its sug- 
gested application to individuals ; in such matters 
there need be no question of integrity and good 
intent. 

Mrs. Besant was and is still a typical figure of 

304 



FAITHS AND UNFAITHS 305 

the time, in her power to hold the most contra- 
dictory faiths for fair trial. I have known her, or 
known of her, in almost every phase. She was a 
clergyman's wife, never perhaps a very orthodox 
one, though she seems to have done her best. 
At this stage, she used to steal into her husband's 
church, when she knew she would have it all to 
herself — that is to say on week-days — and mount 
the pulpit to try her powers in saying something 
on her own account to the attentive echoes. In 
the next stage, with a due interval, of course, she 
has become a disciple of Mr. Bradlaugh, our East 
End Voltaire or Tom Paine with a difference to 
intensify the spirit of denial, who denounced the 
religion of the churches as a mockery. Her 
heretical self-assertion was a great blow to her 
brother-in-law, Walter Besant, who actually altered 
the accentuation of the family name, by way of 
showing that she had no longer part or lot in its 
fortunes. Her children have been devoted to her 
from first to last. 

Bradlaugh was still a priest in his way, and in 
his new cult of Reason inducted neophytes with 
a ceremonial, and buried them when they happened 
to want it. One of the many Holyoakes was with 
him, and kept shop as publisher of the literature 
of the movement, in a house in the network of 
courts between Fleet Street and Holborn. The 
full ritual was used at his funeral. The mourners 
were told how consonant it was to his feelings 
in life to await his sure and certain resurrection 
as cereals for the nourishment of his fellow-creatures, 
or as flowers for their delight. 



306 MY HARVEST 

Bradlaugh's eloquence of strong logical exposition 
was extraordinary, and so was his debating power 
with its flashes of humour and of scorn. There 
are to this day abiding traces of his influence in 
the perfectly ordered sequence of Mrs. Besant's 
themes, and the studied clearness of her delivery. 
The silvery voice is all her own, if indeed she is 
not as much indebted to nature as to art for the 
rest. She held her rude audiences at the Hall of 
Science, as she has since held others of every degree, 
by the sheer magic of her oratorical powers. I have 
a vivid recollection of her at a somewhat later 
period, arrayed in all her striking beauty, in a 
crimson gown, and delivering, with a sort of 
measured fury, a commemorative address on the 
Commune of Paris. It was a fine performance ; 
she might have stood for a statue of the goddess of 
war in the personality of an inspired petroleuse. 
She was a republican, an unbeliever, a holder of 
the most extraordinary doctrines on the relations 
of the sexes, a duplicate one might say, in regard 
to all authority, of old Blanqui with his " neither 
God nor master." 

A change and an interval of years, and I am 
with the Theosophists in the Avenue Road, to 
find her as the mild and submissive catechumen 
of that profession of faith. She has met Madame 
Blavatsky, and has found religion in an importation 
from the East. She sits, metaphorically, at the 
feet of the old arch-priestess with the staring eyes 
like bits of glittering enamel, the mannish voice, 
the unwieldy bulk, the habits of the valetudinarian. 
The cooing as of the turtle, that belongs more 



FAITHS AND UNFAITHS 307 

properly to the environment of the doctrine of 
universal love, is done by the new disciple, the 
former pythoness of the revolutionary platform. 
Her eyes are suffused with a soft glow of trust in 
her teacher that by no means stops short of faith 
in what we should ignorantly call her miracles. 

The surroundings being propitious, the teacher 
may, if the humour takes her, give the visitors 
a touch of her craftmanship there and then. Some- 
one, let us say, has expressed a wish for a gold 
ring. Nothing easier ; a wave of the hand in the 
air, and, perhaps, a few muttered words of in- 
cantation, and the ring is produced from space, 
and handed to the visitor. But the first condition 
of its production, as all are carefully informed, 
is to hold it no miracle at all. It is simply a result 
of a deeper knowledge of the properties of matter, 
as these have been discovered in the course of 
countless ages by the Mahatmas, or wise men of 
the East, and communicated to the lady in the 
chair. I was not fortunate enough to witness this 
demonstration ; I did but hear of it as an un- 
questionable fact. 

In India, as we all know by the proceedings 
of the Psychical Research Society, the same 
magician of science has produced from the earth 
under her feet, a whole tea service, tongs and all, 
for the refreshment of herself and the disciples. 
They thirsted, and there was nothing at hand. 
They were told to dig under a neighbouring tree, 
and, lo ! all things needful, as neatly packed as 
any basket at the railway stations. It is true that 
an angry servant of the household afterwards 



308 MY HARVEST 

confessed to placing it there by authority the 
night before, and to connivance in the arrange- 
ments by which the party was led to the exact 
spot to find it on call. 

These quarrels did not shake the faith of be- 
lievers, and if you were not a believer, you might 
go elsewhere. But first join the classes for in- 
struction, and give yourself a chance. The 
Mahatmas in their lonely retreats in the Himalayas 
think nothing of such trivial manifestations of 
power. Much more could they do, much more 
could they impart, but for the fear of the misuse 
of it by the ignorance or the malevolence of un- 
regenerate man. They could turn out not only 
rings but earthquakes with a wave of the hand. 
But never fear ; they will keep us all safe until 
they have the full and perfect assurance that 
their secrets will be used to no purpose but the 
common good of the race. 

Presently, if we are highly favoured, we may 
be asked to move to the dining-room for a frugal 
meal that involves no violence to animal life in 
any of its forms. On the way there you must not 
so much as put a foot on a blackbeetle if it crosses 
your path. We are all little brothers and sisters 
of St. Francis in that respect. The teachers 
unbend. One shows in quite a matter-of-fact way 
that he is often in conversational touch with the 
Hebrew patriarchs or the Hindoo sages. Nobody 
exhibits the slightest astonishment ; it is simply 
a piece of society news from that higher astral 
plane which these personages have long since 
attained. Mrs. Besant, perhaps, makes passing 



FAITHS AND UNFAITHS 309 

mention of a call that very morning from Bradlaugh 
(long since dead), and of his cheery salutation : 
" You were right — there is a life beyond the 
grave." They had parted company on her con- 
version, but they never ceased to be good friends. 
Dinner over, we move to the library to circularise 
the universe on the business of propaganda, through 
the medium of the halfpenny post. 

Another change, and we are in the lecture room 
to listen to an amazing discourse by the same 
lady, on the progress of a primordial germ of soul 
in the making, through the starry spheres. It is 
a tedious business — I mean the journey — running 
through thousands and even millions of years in 
time and billions of miles in space. The itinerary 
is as explicit and as matter of fact as a jotting 
for a drive through the dukeries in a motor-car. 
The germ abides for so many aeons — say in Orion : 
I do not speak by the card, but only for the purpose 
of illustration ; any name will do, and any period, 
if only it is big enough. Other calls on Jupiter, 
Uranus or Saturn, may run collectively into a 
few millions more of evolution, until the little 
stranger of the spirit has matured into a com- 
parative fullness of being that may qualify it for 
the higher service of man on our planet, with an 
office on an Indian peak. 

At another time, still in the Avenue Road, the 
same extraordinary person is, or rather was, to 
be found in summer seated on the grass in the 
garden, and imparting instruction to a knot of 
disciples mainly in skirts, like hers, of Indian 
cut. She has arrived at full mastery now ; Madame 



310 MY HARVEST 

Blavatsky — " H.P.B." for reference — is dead, or 
rather has passed over to another stage of being, 
while still, of course, in active superintendence of 
the work. The creamy white of the draperies of 
the new instructress-in-chief is in harmony with 
her still beautiful hair ; and every sparing touch 
of ornament bears its symbolic suggestion of the 
mysteries. The scene is perfect as a picture ; it 
is almost Buddha under the Bo-tree, in full 
assurance of the perfect wisdom and the perfect 
peace, and ready to impart its secret to suffering 
humanity. 

Once more, and she stands on the platform of 
some hall at the West End, packed with one of 
the most eminently respectable audiences in 
London. I miss the working-man in her following, 
I mean as a feature. The message he wants to 
hear is delivered usually at the other end of town. 
Her address is impeccable in its measured and 
restrained eloquence, its clarity, and all the graces 
of rhetoric, and it takes its stately march from 
beginning to end without a pause for a thought 
or a word. This is the more remarkable, because 
it is as abstruse as anything in the higher mathe- 
matics. 

Another vision and she is at the Fabian Society, 
revisiting the glimpses of the moon of Socialism, 
almost as an act of grace. She has stood on that 
platform or others of the kind many a time before, 
in one instance, as we have seen, to glorify red 
ruin and the breaking up of laws, to rouse masses 
against classes, to inspire the terror of the Terror 
that is to come, if the people in possession do not 



FAITHS AND UNFAITHS 311 

mend their ways. To-night it is quite a different 
tale. She is here to bless what she was ready to 
curse — wise theocracies uniting king and priest 
as governors, a docile people immutably fixed in 
their stations and pursuits, and as a result the 
only taste of the golden age ever vouchsafed to 
man. The Society listens in respectful silence, 
not of assent, but of courtesy. She is a guest ; 
she was once a comrade ; she was always straight 
according to her convictions — let her have her 
say without a jarring word. The debate that 
follows runs its course on these lines ; and it is 
quite amusing to see how champion after champion 
of the wholly opposite way of thinking contrives 
to preserve his loyalty to his own political faith, 
without casting the slightest reflection upon hers. 
The buttons are on the foils all the time, or, to 
change the figure, it is a perfect egg dance in the 
order of ideas. Not a shell is broken, even when 
we hear that the virtuous king was universal 
banker and universal trustee, keeping so much of 
the revenue for the maintenance of the priests 
and the temples, so much for the civil adminis- 
tration, and laying out the rest for the benefit of 
his people, who had earned the whole, without 
troubling them to put their hands in their pockets 
for the satisfaction of a single want. Ask where it 
happened, it was naturally somewhere in India ; 
ask when — almost before the beginning of days, as 
known to our calendars of mushroom growth. 

A last vision — I trust only to this date — is of an 
aged lady still arrayed in the white of her sacer- 
dotal function, and waiting patiently to cross 



312 MY HARVEST 

Piccadilly at flood time with the help of a police- 
man, and of a young lady in charge. Hats are 
raised here and there, but I am not quite sure 
that she is aware of them, in spite of the unfading 
brilliancy of the eyes. The step is cautious ; the 
form stoops. Then I learn from the papers that 
she has come on one of her brief visits from India, 
to give another course of lectures for the benefit 
of the Western world. 

The central theme of the lectures is a perfect 
unity — the immanence of God. Man is a spiritual 
intelligence sharing in God's eternity, and unfolding 
the divine powers of his Father, by means of re- 
incarnation, through countless ages of progress. 
As all men partake in the Divine Nature all are 
unfolding towards happiness. Where, then, is there 
room for sorrow, since God is everywhere, and He 
is bliss ? 

This doctrine has reached the pulpits — that of 
The City Temple particularly — it has even reached 
Dean's Yard, a greater conquest still, for Arch- 
deacon Wilberforce holds a congregation spell- 
bound with the idea. He has not conquered 
The Yard, for The Yard is virtually Westminster 
Abbey ; but the more significant fact is that The 
Yard has not conquered him. The frown of out- 
raged British orthodoxy cannot prevail against 
him, though but for that, no doubt, he would 
long since have been a Bishop. He does not 
mind. 

Another of his fancies, as they are estimated in 
that quarter, is the compelling power of simul- 
taneous silent prayer in a concentration of the 



FAITHS AND UNFAITHS 313 

whole nature on a desire for one particular good. 
Every Sunday, the lean mystic, who ought to 
have been born on the banks of the Ganges, reads 
a list of requests for aid of this kind, from sufferers 
of every description. Thus specialised, the practice 
has become quite a different thing in its cogency 
of appeal from the ordinary prayers of the Church 
Service for those troubled in mind or estate. The 
congregation sits or kneels, as though in trance, 
generally with eyes closed. It is a bold under- 
taking, since its efficacy is subject to the almost 
immediate test of the event. It has had remark- 
able success. Some years ago a lady student 
at one of the hospitals suddenly disappeared 
under extraordinary circumstances, and the whole 
country, to say nothing of her agonised family, 
was longing to know her fate. Her correspondence 
had been ransacked ; the police had done their 
best ; but all in vain. The Archdeacon mentioned 
the case from the pulpit, and urged the congregation 
to fix its mind on a petition for the discovery of a 
clue. A few hours later some urchins, trespassing 
in a copse in Richmond Park, came upon the body 
with a phial of poison by its side. 

Dean's Yard did not half like the look of it, but 
it had to hold its peace. It is not without its own 
eccentricities of belief, which its extra-territorial 
position in regard to episcopal jurisdiction enables 
it to hold without fear of the pastoral staff. In 
select cases it has a kindly though a strictly un- 
official eye on the Second Adventists. The in- 
crease of this sect is one of the most extraordinary 
signs of the time. It is one of the few that spread 



814 MY HARVEST 

among the people ; the others mostly begin 
with the dilettanti of religious thought, and end 
with them. In such exalted spheres the attraction 
is not so much belief for its practical uses in the 
battle of life ; it is rather belief about beliefs, 
as one of the luxuries of religious and often mystical 
speculation. The people, on the contrary, demand 
a faith they can hold with the tremendous clutch 
of their manifold and ever-pressing needs. They 
want the medicine that will do them good in the 
crises of their poverty and their helplessness. 
I have seen a whole congregation prostrate, or on 
all fours, waiting with groans and cries for a Second 
Coming that may take place at any moment of 
the day or night. " Here ! Now ! To-morrow 
perhaps ! " at the latest, and the Redeemer in 
the skies, with hosts of attendant angels, to chain 
the devil, for a thousand years, with a prospect 
of one more great upheaval at the end of it that 
shall bind him for ever. And with the Coming, 
an immediate transfer of all the rule of princi- 
palities and powers into the hands of the new 
aristocracy of sainthood that now lies prone in 
a tabernacle over a chandler's shop, or to its 
kindred congregations in the like humble setting 
all over the English-speaking world — particularly 
in America. 

Their ministrant on this occasion is no mitred 
member of the hierarchies as they stand in the 
accepted faiths of Christendom, but haply an 
ex-army pensioner or policeman, who drops his 
h's in his utter unconcern about any form of speech 
but the Unknown Tongue. This is still a tongue 



FAITHS AND UNFAITHS 315 

unknown even to himself, for you are to understand 
that he is merely a channel of communication. 
He says what it is put into him to say ; and he 
needs an interpreter as much for himself as for 
the congregation. The real speaker is Very God, 
delivering an oracle. 

Help is at hand. When the minister takes his 
seat again, with every sign of extreme fatigue in 
body and in mind, a sister rises with the same 
divinely given power of interpretation, specialized 
in herself, as the power of deliverance was specialized 
in the other ; and turns the message, still without 
the aspirates if you like, into the current speech 
of the class to which most of them belong. She 
could not parse her version, to save her life, still 
less could she repeat it in the original ; her sole 
duty and power is to get it Englished as the words 
are put into her mind by the higher power. Its 
burden is Here ! and Now ! the skies may open 
to the dazzling visitation of glory as you walk 
home through the miry ways to-night. And then? 
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every one 
of you, the half-epileptic washerwoman, the toil- 
worn street-sweeper and what not, will be suddenly 
called upon to take a leading place in the govern- 
ance of the world, and to undergo a full and 
complete transformation of flesh and spirit for the 
change. 

Their term of service is the thousand years for 
the start. To equip them for the higher calling 
their bodies will be charged with absolute in- 
corruptibility, their minds with all the mighty 
secrets and the mighty powers needed for the 



316 MY HARVEST 

guidance of the herd of unregenerate humanity 
committed to their care. 

I walked home with the one who had taken me 
to the service, landlady of a humble lodging-house, 
and old acquaintance. She had the full certainty of 
her mission and of her destiny. 

" ' Behold, I come quickly,' it is written ; what 
more do you want ? " 

" Yes ; but it has been written over nineteen 
hundred years and yet " 

" Ah, they didn't know how to read the pro- 
phecies ; we do," and she drenched me with a 
shower of texts. " The world is too wicked ; the 
saints must rule." 

" Yourself perhaps to be a ruler under the 
King ? " 

" Under the King of Glory, please." 

" Would your knowledge, your habits of life, 
your experience ? " 

She turned impatiently from me : " All that will 
be given to His saints." 

" And those who have gone to their graves 
through the long night of waiting ? " 

" They will rise to bear their part — if they are 
saints, mind you ! It is written : you must not 
argue about it : we are instruments : all will be 
given to us in full measure. Believe." 



CHAPTER XXIII 
THRESHING OUT 

THE time has come to thresh out a few sheaves. 
Our age differs from its forerunners, mainly 
in the individual's cultivated sense of himself. 
All the religions, of course, have tried to give him 
that ; but where, before, it was the sense of what 
he owed, it is now only the sense of what is due 
to him. The principle is the creditor as the crown 
of things, in his craze for ' personality,' a hybrid 
of etymology, enjoying the freedom of every city. 
Hitherto there has been some idea of the obligation 
to put the whole before the part. It is mind your 
own business to-day ; and, if you want farther 
guidance, consult the looking-glass. 

The change has brought a thousand others in 
its train. How simple the issues in politics when 
the two old-fashioned parties had their square 
stand-up fight, and there was no room within 
them, or no inclination for finer shades of sub- 
division. With us it was represented by the 
occasional set-to between Lord Palmerston and 
the Tiverton butcher. ' Pam ' went down for 
his annual address to constituents ; and the 
butcher, who, as a free and independent elector, 
did not happen to think much of him, told him 
so to his face. The winner of a hundred fights 

317 



318 MY HARVEST 

in Parliament replied ; The Times came out 
with a verbatim report ; the country had its 
laugh, and there was an end of it, till next 
year. 

Think of but one day of Mr. Asquith's, com- 
pared with the three hundred and sixty-five of 
the other — parties by the dozen, movements, 
deputations, secret exits and entrances to his 
own house, with bodyguards against occasional 
throwers of the hatchet. Every one of these persons 
is astir for others only by accident or necessity ; 
his banner bears the device of his own hand. 

The major prophets of the movement are of 
great standing and power, with Ibsen leading the 
way in influence, if not absolutely in the order of 
time. All or nothing, and all for just what I see 
and no more. How different from old Carlyle, 
who exercised the Censorial office in our Victorian 
time. He would be but superficially described as 
a Primitive Indigestion brooding over the Seven 
Days of Creation, and finding it all a mistake. 
He saved himself in time by the ethic of the Ever- 
lasting Yea. To be fair, however, in the decline 
of his power, he came perilously near Superman. 
Some of his heroes were hardly distinguishable 
from the asses of self-will, and of that terrible 
variety the Zebra or Wild Ass of the plains, whose 
kick of sheer high spirits is death. The favourite 
diversion of this animal, I can but suspect, is 
to masquerade in the skin of the Laughing 
Lion. 

Blessedness, the sweet of adversity for the 
building up of character, self-control, self-denial, 



THRESHING OUT 819 

the old beatitudes, no matter what their theological 
setting, the old new birth of the spirit into its 
real self-hood, in one word, all that differentiates 
the finished article from the mere mistakes of the 
potter, these, I think, in their struggle for the 
recovery of the old ethical pattern, are going 
to be the note of a new time. Leave the others 
to live from a single function, mainly physical : 
man is a harmony. 

Ibsen's Brand is one of these melancholy failures 
in the attempt to make a single organ do the work 
of all. He knows no hindrance, no misgiving. 
It is not pessimism because pessimism is a positive 
quality, it is a sheer ' I will ' — the thing I see, the 
thing I want idealized as rounded perfect and all- 
sufficing, and pursued at all costs with no corrective 
but the raw result in failure. What would the 
gentle Matthew Arnold have thought of that ? 
Peer Gynt again, another self-absorbed monster 
of the same cast. Nietzsche — now being white- 
washed into a missionary, by shamed interpreters 
who themselves need a touch of the brush — 
much the same. And with them, as it seems, on 
the surface, an attack in form on all the old pieties, 
symbolized as morality in the governance of life. 
Every man to do as he pleases, and let the best 
man win. And what driving force brought to the 
work, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn for the 
giftless, and, as a backing, German science and 
German learning. For absolutes, you cannot go 
beyond that. Dionysus is out for the fun of the 
fair, and woe to Apollo who stands in his way 
with the antiquated rules. Mr. Oscar Levy has 



320 MY HARVEST 

made a gallant attempt to save his client by 
showing that all his doctrine, rightly interpreted, 
is but a protest against individualism in the wrong 
persons — that is against ninety-nine hundredths 
of the human race. Their business is not to be 
levelled up to knowledge, but levelled down to 
obedience and acquiescence. 

There is much scholarship in it all, and as little 
wisdom ; and in the occasional difference between 
these is the underlying fallacy of the whole move- 
ment. Our local variety of that fallacy is the 
sordid Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, which once 
bid fair to make us the laughing-stock of the 
world. Bacon was the most learned person of 
his time ; Shakespeare, as its reputed best writer, 
was one of the least learned ; therefore Bacon 
must have written the plays. Shakespeare was a 
very low fellow : all minds of this calibre seem 
instinctively to rage against him. " Dost thou 
sleep only ? " says the chamberlain of the Vatican, 
as with ivory gavel he taps the brow of the dead 
Pope. The Pope goes on keeping as quiet as 
Shakespeare by Avonside. 

Mr. Shaw is the new self-realization preached 
through a megaphone, and still but Master Slender 
or Aguecheek with the strong word if he dies for 
it. To wit : 

" With the single exception of Homer, there is 
no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, 
whom I can despise so utterly as I despise Shake- 
speare when I measure my mind against his. The 
intensity of my impatience with him occasionally 
reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a 



THRESHING OUT 321 

relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, 
knowing as I do how incapable he and his wor- 
shippers are of understanding any less obvious 
form of indignity. To read Cymheline and to 
think of Goethe, of Wagner, of Ibsen, is, for me, 
to imperil the habit of studied moderation of 
statement which years of public responsibility 
as a journalist have made almost second nature 
in me." La you now ! 

A pretty journalist with this vile rhodomontade 
for his standard of the decencies of the craft. 

The lack of critical faculty, to say nothing of 
education, in it all is really without excuse. Shake- 
speare will never be understood till we study him, 
not merely as the actor-manager, but as the author- 
manager. He had to fill his theatre, and he could 
not turn out a new Hamlet or a new Othello every 
time he wanted a change of bill. He probably 
took Cyrnbeline out of the famous wooden box as it 
had come to him with the other properties, touched 
it up in a night and a day, played it as long as he 
could, threw it back into the box again, and when, 
finally, he shook the dust of London from his feet, 
left the whole precious load there for Hemyng and 
Condell to rescue for posterity years after, less by 
man's contrivance than by the grace of God. 

This accident, and his supreme indifference to the 
plays, as distinct perhaps from the Sonnets, made 
the Shakespeare canon. His emendatory touches 
are easily traced by anyone with the slightest sense 
of literature. Look out for the bits of fine gold. 
There are such in Cymheline. Who — of course 
with the single exception of Mr. Shaw — could 



322 MY HARVEST 

have written " Hark ! hark, the lark " or " Fear 
no more the heat o' the sun " ? The hne of cleavage 
is quite clear as between what might have been 
written by anybody, and what could have been 
written by but one alone. You may give the rest to 
Anon., and welcome, or to Bacon, if you like. It 
was careless of their author to have failed to enter 
them at Stationers' Hall, but the giants of old 
were like that. It is a case of put yourself in his 
place — if Mr. Shaw is able to do that in regard 
to any living organism in creation. ' My habit of 
studied moderation ' — Hark ! hark ! " the cox- 
comb bird." 

It is needless to labour the point of Scott. Every 
work of every kind is to be judged by its historic 
standpoint — what it did in and for its time. Never 
mind his superficial faults, most of them due to 
haste, think of his colossal achievement, and of the 
glowing tribute of gratitude from contemporaries 
for a whole literature, revolutionized in the outlook 
throughout the world. 

Homer — but really why go on ? 

I came late to a Fabian lecture one day, but 
unhappily still in time to hear Mr. Shaw sum up 
the life-work of Darwin as that of a ' pigeon 
fancier.' 

A few made wry faces, but the Fabian giggle 
ran round the room. 

" He is always so cheerful," said one. 

" So merry," corrected another. 

" You can't help laughing," added a third, 
" even when you don't know what he's talking 
about." 



THRESHING OUT 323 

All this may be good business from the height 
of the trestles at a fair, but, in my humble judg- 
ment, it makes a poor contribution to thought. 
The same thing may be said of the crude blasphemies 
of Blanco Posnet as a sort of first essay, and of 
the ' swear-word ' of another play only for the 
culmination. The portentous prefaces to these 
productions are of the same order of technic. 
But why not print them at the top of the page, 
and treat the play as the notes ? The wretched 
girding at morals throughout is all of a piece : 
at best, it is only one moral more, and a bad 
one. 

" You make a great fuss about him," once 
said a brilliant Irishwoman to me : "we have a 
man like that at the cross-roads of every village 
snacking every passer-by for the benefit of the 
crowd." 

"So, for that matter," I said, " had the Achaians 
of the despised Iliad. ^^ 

" Yes, but Agamemnon was at hand with his 
truncheon, so it came out all right." 

It seemed to account for much, especially for that 
wellnigh invariable depreciation of the English, 
to whom he owes all but the very breath of his 
nostrils. 

The lines still rang in my ears : — 

The coxcomb bird so talkative and grave 

That from his cage cries cuckold . . . and knave ; 

Though many a passenger he rightly call, 

You hold him no philosopher at all. 

In this case it is no doubt complicated by certain 
misadventures of inherited character. The Shaws, 



324 MY HARVEST 

it seems, were always proud of their standing as 
" dacent people." The last of their line to date 
tries hard to disclaim all share in these pre- 
tensions, but nature is too much for him. Hence 
the portraits, with their artful arrangements of the 
lights to show the man of mystery, or the readings 
of the hand, offered freely to the Press or to the 
biographers. And, above all, hence the fatuous 
family tree, drawn up for the benefit of an admirer, 
and as I seem to remember, a dreary plateau of 
squireens with a knight as makeshift for an alp. 
But of course this is given only as contribution 
to a science of eugenics, that is beginning to cover 
a multitude of sins against common sense and 
even common decency. In one of his speeches Mr. 
Shaw described himself as roaming London, almost 
in vain, to find a woman to whom he might con- 
descend to throw the eugenical handkerchief — in 
the sole interest, of course, of the improvement of 
the race. 

The portentous development of the organ of 
Self-Esteem may explain all. It would be a kind- 
ness on his part to leave it to the College of Surgeons, 
with due notice of the bequest, in advance, to 
give them time to see about the making of the 
bottle. 

Yet withal it seems but a poor conception 
of a career. Test his whole output by the method 
of the Virgilian lots, and the result is almost 
invariably some brutal insult to an honoured name. 
For the love of — well, say The Life Force, let us 
get this spirit out of our hearts and out of our 
lives. 



THRESHING OUT 325 

The deliberate cultivation of individuality takes 
equally curious and arbitrary forms in other 
quarters. This most commonly happens when 
it is akin to the process of watering a stick. The 
Italian Futurists and Cubists have been especially 
fortunate in the issue of their attempt to put the 
cart before the horse. 

They were a number of young men who started 
with the assumption that they had a right to be 
somebody in particular, as in other circumstances 
they might have said they had a right to bread and 
life. They were quite frank about it : as artists 
they saw there was scant chance of distinction 
for them in a rivalry with the old masters who 
held the field. But one thing remained — to invent 
a new art, and at the same time to proclaim loudly 
the patriotic duty of scrapping all the old. Youth 
will be served : Italy's art treasures were really 
Italy's ruin : away with them to the funeral pyre. 
Here at once was individuality by the short cut, 
and with both a consciousness and a method. 

The next step was the propaganda by the puff. 
They accordingly began to make themselves a 
nuisance by provoking little conflicts with the 
police, as obstructionists of the public highway. 
When they were taken before the magistrate, 
they made violent speeches from the dock, to the 
reporters ; and, if things still looked unpromising 
for an effective curtain, they got themselves fined 
for an insult to the Bench. With that they went 
out to lunch, by preference at a window open to 
the view from the street, and wound up the banquet 
by toasting each other's individuality for the 



326 MY HARVEST 

benefit of the crowd. The incident was then 
circularized, in their name, to the foreign Press, 
principally our own, with a request for a notice. 
They took extraordinary pains with this part of 
the work, for in many instances they had quite 
pat the names and addresses of prominent persons 
on the staff. The notices began to see the light, 
at first in derision, afterwards on a footing that 
gave them the status of an item of the foreign 
news. The agent in advance had now done his 
work ; and when his employers came to London, 
they found London ready for them. 

The mechanical principle of this new movement 
was somewhat like that of the motor, progress 
by shock. The old painting dealt with harmonies 
in form and colour, composition, the exquisite 
niceties of effect in the values and variations of 
light. The new had to discard all these for a 
method of expression by the variation of geometrical 
forms. A mass of cubes, squares or circles came to 
signify a storm, a street scene, a public meeting, 
or a parting of lovers. On a first view you seemed 
to see nothing but a Walpurgis night dance of the 
illustrations to Euclid, but a second, under in- 
struction, was understood to reveal the basic 
principle of the subject in its arrangement of these 
angular shapes. In other words, the essential 
idea was that you had only to transfer the pro- 
perties of one set of physical phenomena to 
another to produce a new art. Thus certain 
French authors, of a somewhat earlier date, dis- 
covered that words had odours as well as sounds, 
and accordingly began to write by an organ, till 



THRESHING OUT 32T 

then chiefly associated with the sense of smell. 
In each case, the new art with the new individuality 
behind it was launched on its triumphant career. 
In London, at least, the Futurists became quite 
the fashion, and they probably went home to 
report " sold out " as the issue of the venture. 

As a rule, the more you leave your originality 
to take care of itself the better for everybody con- 
cerned. Yet it admits of one mode of cultivation 
which is entirely of the right sort. Flaubert 
touched on that, in one of his counsels to Mau- 
passant. The latter, then I believe in his nonage, 
complained that his work seemed hardly his own, 
and went to his mentor to ask him how he was to 
become himself. " Wait " was the answer in 
effect : " yourself is the last achievement, not the 
first." He meant that you had to begin by clearing 
away the accretions of the habit of imitation. 
But how he would have raged in his glorious way, 
if he had been taken to mean a mere trick of 
eccentricity. 

All the arts at present have a tendency to mistake 
this pinchbeck substance for the true metal. You 
have it in music, rapidly degenerating into a 
series of imitative effects in the pattering of rain 
in a shower, the booming of the guns in a battle, 
with the artist at the big drum, now something 
of a gymnast in his gyrations, lording it over the 
rest of the orchestra. The true function of this 
divinest of all the arts is to express the in- 
expressible : it should know nothing of definition. 

We have seen it in politics, with syndicalism as 
the new bid for originality in the popular party, 



328 MY HARVEST 

though it is no more than a sheer reaction towards 
the profit-mongering of the old guilds. The 
Snowdens, the Macdonalds, and, if he has left a 
successor, the Hardies, notwithstanding his occa- 
sional trend to eccentricity of orbit, will soon set 
that right. Such men are in training for full states- 
manship. Their brief holidays are spent in tour- 
ing the world, and especially the empire, for the 
study of problems at first hand. 

Their great opportunity will come at the close of 
our world war. They have to show that voluntary 
enlistment will beat conscription at its own game, 
without the loss of a single liberty of a free 
people. That will be, not one, but all the nails 
for the coffin of militarism. Why not organize 
the school courses of one sex for the teaching of 
drill, in the absolute perfection of efficiency for 
the parade ground and the line of battle ; of the 
other, for nursing in the field ? This, and a real 
volunteer movement to follow, in place of the old 
one starved and snubbed out of existence by 
the military caste, would do the rest. There need 
be no element of compulsion in it from first to 
last. The drill and the nursing would still be a 
matter of free choice in recreation on the part of 
all concerned, parents and children alike. Ninety 
per cent would probably come in at a bound at 
the start, and the remnant would not long stand 
out. Football and other diversions of Kipling's 
" oaf " would still take their proper place, and 
still a good one. He has made ample amends 
for the earlier errors of his ways in his recent 
glowing tribute to voluntaryism in national defence 



THRESHING OUT 329 

as " the new thing in a new world." Let us have 
it everywhere and not in rehgion alone ; it is our 
British note. 

Keep the faddists out of all these vital energies 
of our national life. The old ways are still very 
good ways, with due adaptation to the needs of 
the time ; and in saying this I bate no jot of my 
wildest hopes for the democratic cause. 

A French youth, of more parts than judgment, 
was once ill-advised enough to worry Anatole 
France for a prophecy — on " the literature of 
to-morrow." Would it be Idealism — Patriotism, 
aesthetic and philosophic — Subjectivism, with all 
its doctrines of the exception — Triumph of de- 
mocracy ? What had the future in store for lads 
of gold all agog for the new thing ? 

The veteran's answer was a cold douche : 
" Never mind about to-morrow ; that will take 
care of itself; the only future within our reach 
is the present and the past. The finest epochs of 
all art have been those of harmony and tradition, 
when the individual did not have it all his own 
way. As for your precious list, I cannot in the 
least understand what it all means. Where I am 
able to apprehend anything of the new literature, 
I may say that much of it is narrow, brutal, gross, 
without taste, without the measure which is the 
all in all. It fears neither to shock nor to 
displease. It thinks it has done everything when 
it has offended decency, and outraged all the 
proprieties." 

What would he have thought of Shaw on Shake- 
speare ? I saw them once together on the same 

Y 2 



330 MY HARVEST 

platform. The irony of the situation, if one could 
have had the faintest idea of the other's concept 
of letters and of life ! 

This good breeding of the pen is a great point 
with the French. Literature is the medium in 
which they render their idea of the gentleman. 
They have absolutely no mercy for the bull in the 
china shop on the search for emphasis. 

With our younger writers of the day, such 
curiosity as there is about the future takes a 
more rational turn. " In that noddle of yours," 
says Arnold Bennett to aspiring youth, " is every- 
thing necessary to development, for the achieving 
of happiness, and you are absolutely lord over the 
noddle will you but exercise your powers of lord- 
ship, self-control, in a word, mastery and common 
sense." And he goes on to glorify " the intensive 
culture of the reason — habit forming by concentra- 
tion." The wisdom of Marcus Aurelius and of 
Epictetus is generally good enough for him. Wells 
follows, or rather leads, very much in the same 
line — efficiency. Archer, who has done so much 
for the innovators, is still our greatest sobering 
force. The last still awaits the full recognition 
he deserves. Perhaps his ' manner ' is his hindrance 
in a self-advertising age. It is marked only by his 
fervour for truth and fairplay, and by his attitude 
of discipleship towards a whole order of great ideas 
on which assuredly he is the best qualified to lay 
down the law. 

Alas, how we sometimes play at being alive ! 
At a college near Philadelphia, it seems, they 
train girls into " superwomen," by a system which 



THRESHING OUT 331 

sends them out into the air in all weathers — in 
waterproofs for the rainy days — to write their 
exercises. Poor little things, and poorer bigger 
ones to follow, one can but fear. But probably 
their fate, if they are not called to repentance 
by a timely cold, may prove the best corrective of 
all. Superman is but a figure for the Fifth of 
November in our streets — stuffed with rubbish 
by the nature of his being. Those of higher faculty 
owe infinite help and even deference to those of 
lower. The strong man rules — himself, and serves 
the others. While the effigy holds its place as a 
god in Germany, Germany must be on its way to 
the abyss. She was once re-made by a literature 
of the right sort ; she is going to be unmade by a 
literature of the wrong. May all of us be saved 
from too striking a victory, lest we run the same 
course. 

A fateful course it is, a veritable Fortune's wheel. 
The sufferings of a people beget its virtues ; its 
virtues beget its faculty ; its faculty, its arrogance ; 
its arrogance, its decay. All history, Jew and 
Gentile, tells the same tale — our own is no ex- 
ception. Is there no way of lashing down the 
wheel at power wisely won and wisely used ? The 
whole problem of life is there. Efficiency is too 
narrowly construed, even by the best of us. 
Bennett's " noddle " is but its journeyman ; the 
soul must still be master from first to last. By 
all means learn the job of your workshop, what- 
ever it may be, founding a science, or cooking a 
beefsteak. But your head and your hands are not 
enough ; the true source and sustainer of all the 



332 MY HARVEST 

powers must still be the heart. I ask for more, 
and ever more, of that in the current energies of 
the day. 

I wrote John Street in the hope of giving this 
organ a lift to its place, within the measure of 
my powers. I began it on quite a different scheme, 
but much of it was so obliging as to write itself as 
I went on. It was all I could do ; the best of us 
can say no more. 



THE END 



INDEX 



About, 85, 143 

Adam, Madame, 140-6, v. Lamber 
Alabama Arbitration, 93-8 
Alfonso of Spain, 113, 116, 120, 

121, 122 
Amateior casual, 56 
America, art, 208 

— Centennial Exhibition, 206 

— cities, local independence of, 

127 

— Copyright, 209 

— democracy, 217-219 

— Gladstone on, 98-107 

— Literature, old and new, 206, 

207, 216, 217 

— Rip Van Winkle, the new, 

216 

— settlers in Paris, 207, 208 

— typical American of future, 

219, 220 

— W. H. H., 209-216 

— Wickedest Man in, 71 
Anarchy, philosophic, 49-51 

— in Spain, 111 

Anglo-French Exhibition, 46, 53 
Anonymity of Press, 66 
Apprenticeship, arts and crafts, 

27 
Archer, WilHam, 330 
Art, American, 208 
art dealers, 34 

— British, teaching schools, 31- 

34 

— French, academic and other, 

238-242 



Art, Italian, Cubists, etc., 325 

— Russian Court painter, 191 
battle painter, 158-170 

Balzac, 136 

Barrie, 2, 270 

Bastien Lepage, 143, 248 

Batignolles, the, 89 

Bennett, Arnold, 330, 331 

Bertillon system, 229, 230 

Besant, Annie, 304-12 

— Walter, 305 
Birmingham, 125, 126 
Bismarck, 145, 180-182 
Black, WiUiam, 62, 63, 67, 71, 

72, 290, 291 
Blanc, Louis, 142 
Blavatski, Madame, 306, 307, 

308, 310 
Blowitz, 137, 140 
Bohemia of the Press, 67-72 
Bookshops, secondhand, 42, 43 
Bouguereau, 238 
Bow Church, Cheapside, 8 

Mile End, 8 

Bowes, Hely, 140 

Bradlaugh, 305, 306, 309 

Brand, Ibsen's, 319 

Brandes, 185 

Brazza, African explorer, 250-3 

Bright, John, 64, 293 

Bromley-by-Bow, palace of, 5, 

6, 15 
Brontes, the, 259, 260 
Brown, Madox, 41 



533 



334 



INDEX 



Brownell, 211, 217 
Browning, Robert, 255, 260-3 
Brownings, the, and Furnivall, 

39, and v. Corkrans, 260-2 
Biirckhardt, 185 
Butler, Samuel (Erewhon), 34, 

296 

Cabanel, 238 

Campbell Clarke, 138, 140 

Carlos, Don, 111-113 

Carlyle, 255, 259, 318 

Carpenter, Edward, 187, 255-7 

Cartagena, Naval mutiny, 111 

Castelar, 108, 109, 112, 113, 119 

Cavaignac and the Reds, 21 

Chamberlain, 125, 126 

Chartists at Kennington Com- 
mon, 11 

Chaucer and Stratford - atte- 
Bowe, 7, 8 

Cheshire Cheese Tavern, 274 

Chesterton, G. K., 300 

Chinese Giant, 78-81 

Clemenceau, 224, 225 

Clubs — English : Bohemian, 67, 
68 

Fireside, 289 

National Liberal, 294 

Omar Khayyam, 294 

Reform, 290-3 

Savage, 68, 288, 290 

Whitefriars, 288 

— French, " Mirlitons," 295 

Union, 296 

Cockburn, Sir Alexander, 94-97 

Coins and medals, 26 

Commune, 49, 50, 111, 306 

Coningsby, Robert, 54-8, 67 

Conscription, 113, 328 

Cook, Captain, fate of his ship, 3 

Cook, Sir E. T., 277 

Copp^e, 152 

Coquelin, the Elder, 223 



Corkrans, the, 135, 136, 260-2, 

266 
Corot, 132 
Correspondents, our own, 135- 

140, 158 
Costermonger articles, 57, 58, 

66, 67 
Courbet, 238 

Coventry Patmore, 298, 299 
Crawfords, the, 138, 140 
Crimean war, 24, 25 
Cruickshank reformed, 264, 265 
Cubists, 325 
Gushing, Caleb, 94-8 

Daily Mail, 74 
Daily News, 137-40, 271-85 
Daily Telegraph, 73, 74, 137, 138 
Daudet, Alphonse, 199 
Davidson, poet and journalist, 

278, 279 
Degas, 48, 238 

Dickens, Charles, 72, 73, 260, 270 
Didon, Pere, 246 
Disraeli, 98, 99 
Dor6, Gustave, 239-42 
Dostoieffsky, 175, 202 
Dublin, 127 

Dumas, the Younger, 85 
Dundonald, Lord, 20 

Edinburgh, as a capital, 126, 

127 
Editor, passing of the, 275 
Eichhorn, 176 

Empire, Second French, 76, 77 
Ems telegram, 181, 182 
Erewhon dinner, 295 
" Ernestine, La Belle," 88 
Eug6nie, Empress, 85 
Evans, Dr., 87 
Exhibitions, Anglo-French, 46, 

63 
— Centennial, U.S.A., 206 



INDEX 



335 



Exhibition, Paris, 1867, 76-92 

— Verestchagin's, 167-9 

Fabian Society, 310, 311 
Faiths, City Temple and West- 
minster Abbey, 312 

— Second Adventists, 313-16 

— Theosophy, 304-12 
Father, my, 1, 14, 24, 44, 74 
Ferry, Jules, 223 
Feuillet, Octave, 85, 86, 199 
Figueras, 108, 114, 120 
Fireside Club, 289 
Flaubert, 85, 143, 327 
Forbes, Archibald, 281, 282 
France, Anatole, 129, 275, 329, 

330 
France, art, 238-42 

— literature, some schools, 242, 

243 

— local independence, 129 

— orators, pulpit, 246-9 

— passim, ch. iv., vi., x-xii., 

xvi., xvii., XX., xxi. 
Freycinet, 143 
Freytag, 175 
Furnivall and the Brownings, 

39, 40 

— at Working Men's College, 

36-8 

— sculling club for girls, 38, 39 
Futurists, 325 

Galliffet, General, 143 
Gambetta, 139, 141-3, 157, 222, 

225, 226 
Geneva Ai'bitration, 92-8 
German workmen, 27, 30 
Germany, the new, 171-5 
Gervinus, 178 
Giesebrecht, 179 
Girardin, 88, 142, 143 
Gladstone, 98-107, 293 
Glasgow art, 124, 125 



Goethe, 321 

Gooch, History and Historians, 
175 

Gorki, 159, 200 
Greenwood, James, 56 
Grimms, the, 176 
Guyot, Yves, 48 

Hardie, Keir, 328 

Harris, Joel C, 216 

— Lake, 211 

Harrison, Frederic, 41 

Hawarden Castle, 99, 100, 101 

Her Majesty's Seals, 24 

Hermitage Picture Gallery, 189 

Hill, Frank, 271, 272 

History of Our Own Times, 61, 62 

History, Prussianized, 175, 180- 

186 
Howard, Mr., 21-3 
Hughes, " Tom," 36 
Hugo, v., 136 

funeral, 154 

grandchildren, 148-51 

grandfather, art of being, 

149-50 

king uncrowned, 147 

Madame, 154 

return to Paris, 151 

salon in Paris, 151-4 

Wagner's lampoon on, 155 

will, 155 

Hurlbert, W. H., 98, 99 
Huxley, 41 
Hyacinthe, Pere, 246-9 

Ibsen, 175, 318, 319, 321 

Interviewing, 97-107 

Irish Exhibition at Olympia, 

62 
Irving, Henry, 64 
Isabella of Spain, 108, 113, 115, 

118. 122 



336 



INDEX 



James, Henry, 209, 268, 269 

— King, palace at Bromley, 6, 

15 

— William, 217 
Jefferson Davis, 100, 104 
Journalism and capital, 285-7 
Journalism old and new, 271-87 

Karr, Alphonse, 88 
Kingsley, Charles, 40 
Kipling, 269, 328 
Kremlin, Moscow, 203, 204 

" Labby," 293, 294 
Lake Harris, 211 
Lamartine, 136 

Lamber, Juliette, 140, v. Adam 
Lang, Andrew, 273-5, 281 
Leconte de Lisle, 143, 152 
Lefebvre, the painter, 238 
Legitimists, Spanish, 111 
Leigh's School of Art, 31-4 
Leo, German historian, 178 
Lesseps, 143, 231-233 
Library, Imperial Russian, 192 
Lincoln's Inn Fields, chambers, 

74 
Liverpool, 125, 130 
Lockroy, Madame, 152 
London, return to, 268, 271 

— tyranny of, 123, 124, 126, 127, 

129, 130 
Ludlow at Working Men's Col- 
lege, 36 

McCarthys, the, 59-65, 93 
Macdonald, Ramsay, 328 
MacMahon's " 16th of May," 

141, 142 
Madrid, 108-10 
Makart, Austrian painter, 166 
Manchester art dealers, 34 
Manchester Guardian, 123, 135 



Manchester, my stay in, 123-5, 

129-134 
Manet, 238 
Marks, of Worldng Men's College, 

41, 42 
Marston, the actor, 67 
Martin {v. Maconochie), 54 
Masefield's Pompey the Great, 

275 
Mathilde, Princesse, 85 
Maupassant, 327 
Maurice, J. D., at W.M.C., 35, 

36, 41 
Maurras, for Chiirch and King, 

246 
Maximilian, Emperor, 77, 91 
Max O'Rell, 289 
Mechanics' Institutes, 36 
Medals and coins, 26 
Meissonier, 160, 238 
Mercedes, Queen of Spain, 115 
Metternich, Princess, 86 
Meurice, Paul, 152 
Meynells, the, 298-303 
Michel, Louise, 226-8 
Millet, the painter, 132 
"Mirlitons" Club, 295 
Moltke, 169 
Monsabre, Pere, 246 
Montpensier, intrigues in Spain, 

115 
Morley, John, editor of Star, 93 
Moscow, 203, 204 
Munkacsy, painter, 241 
Music-hall stars, 271 
Music, modern, 327 

Napoleon III, 21, 49, 91, 92 
Nash's London, 20 
National Liberal Club, 294 
Niebuhr, 175-177 
Nietzsche, 184-6, 319 
Night in a workhouse, 56 
— in Belgrave Square, 57 



INDEX 



337 



No. 5 John Street, 52, 287, 332 
Norfolk Street, Strand, 2 
Nouvelle Revue, La, 143 
Novikoff, Madame de, 197, 198 

Oliphant, Laurence, 211, 212 
Ouida, 83-5, 208 

Palmer, Roundell, Sir, 94, 95 
Palmerston, defence of Canada, 
93, 317 

— and Spanish marriages, 115 

— and the Tiverton butcher, 

317, 318 
Panama scandal, 230-4 
Panslavist movement, Moscow, 

204 
Paris, exhibition of 1887, 7G-92 

— first visit, 46 

— settlement in, 134 
Parkinson, J., 291-293 
Parnellisin and Crime, 65 
Paul, Herbert, 272-273, 276 
Payn, James, 290, 291 
Peer Gynt, 319 

Peter the Great, 188, 193 
Petroleuses, 90 
Phil May, 280 
Pictm-e dealers, 130-134 
Pistrucci, medallist, 25 
Polytechnics, modern, 37 
Pourtales, Madame de, 87 
Pre-Raphaelism, 32 
Press, anonymity of, 66 

— Bohemia of the, 67-72 

— correspondence, old and new, 

135-140 

— night work on the, 279-281 

— prentice work for, 52-58 
Prim, Marshal, 108 
Prisons for debtors, 68-70 
Providhon on women, 144 

' Prue ' Meynell, 302, 3U3 
Prussia, King of, in Paris, 77, 88 



Prussianizing historians, 180-186 

Dahlmann, 180 

Droysen, 180 

Duncker, 180 

Sybel, 179, 180-182 

Treitschke, 179, 182-184 

Pugilists, old and new, 270-271 
Pyrenees, crossing by diligence, 
114 

Queretaro, tragedy of, 77 

Raeburn, 132 

Ranke, 177, 178 

Rapson, Professor, 289 

Rattazzi, Madame, 87 

Ravachol, 228-230 

Reade, Charles, 268 

Reclus, Elie, 48, 49, 51, 52 

Reclus, Elisee, 48-51 

Reform Club, 72, 290-3 

Renan, 86, 152 

Repnin, Russian painter, 159 

Republic in Spain, 109-112 

Renter on sentiment and busi- 
ness, 284, 285 

Revue des Deux Mondes, 143 

Revue, La Nouvelle, 143 

Robertson, Forbes, as art stu- 
dent, 34 

Robinson, Sir J., 281-285, 290 

Rochefort, 225-226 

Rodin, 239 

Rome, my journey to, 205 

Rossetti, Dan be G., 41 

Rothschild, 87 

Rouvier and French finance, 
223-224 

— Madame, "Claude Vignon," 
224 

Roze, Marie, 88 

Ruskin, 36, 255, 259 

Russell, Sir Edward, 64 

Russia, Boyar type, 193-195 



338 



INDEX 



Russia, Court painter, 191 

— Gorki in exile, 200 

— later writers, 203 

— Moscow, Kremlin of, 203-204 

— Novikoff, Mde. de, 197-198 

— salon, Russian, a, 195 

— Tolstoy, later work, 201 

— Turguenieff, vide 339 

— woman of culture, a, 196, 197 

Sainte-Beuve, 86 

St. John's Wood, 17, 19 

Sala, 72, 73 

Salons, 297-303 

— Adam, Madame, 140-143 

— Corkran, the, 136 

— English modern, 297 

— French old, 297 

— Meynell, the, 298-301 

— Russian, 195 
Sargent, 166, 208 
Savage Club, 68, 288-290 
Say, Leon, 143 
Schneider, 88 

Schuyler, Eugene, 188, 205 

— Montgomery, 211 

Science and art department, 30, 

31 
Seeley, Professor, 41 
Semitism, anti-, 183 
Senior, W., 276 
Seven Stars Inn, Bromley, 7 
Shakespeare, Shaw on, 320-322 
Shaw, Bernard, 200, 320-324 
Simon, Jules, 48, 223 
Skobeleff, 145 
Snowden, PhiHp, 328 
Sorbonne, the, 223 
Spain, Alfonso, King of, 113 

— Amadeus, King of, 108, 120 

— anarchist. 111 

— Barcelona insurrection, 114 

— Cortes, debate in the, 110 

— Figueras and the Reds, 114 



Spain, Isabella dethroned, 108 

— Isabella and her dwarf, 118- 

122 

— old and new, 110, 113 

— opera in war time, 110 

— Republic in, 108-112, 122 

— Santa Cruz, mad cure of, 112 

— Serrano, Marshal, 112 

— " Spanish Marriages " in- 

trigue, 115 

— state of siege, 113 

— students. University, 109 
Spielhagen, 175 
Sponging houses, 68 
Sprouts, Mr., his Opinions, 67 
Spy system in France, 234-237 
Standard, The, Paris office, 137, 

140 

Stanley and his rival, 250-253 

Star, The, 56, 64, 93 

Stevenson, R. L., 268 

Stratford-atte-Bowe of Chaucer, 
8 

Sudermann's Magda and Tenny- 
son's Guinevere, 258 

Superman, 184, 185, 318, 331 

Superwoman, 330 

Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, 
265, 267 

Syndicalism, 327 

Taine, 85 

Talmage, De Witt, 211 

Taylor, John Edward, art sale, 

132 
Tennyson, 255, 257-259 
Thackeray in Paris, 136 
Theresa, Paris singer, 88, 243- 

245 
Thomson, Francis, 299, 300, 303 
Times, The, Paris correspondent, 

138-140 
Tolstoy, 175, 195, 201 
Treitschke, 179 



INDEX 



339 



Tribune, New York, 108 
Trochu, General, and Wagner, 

156 
Troitska Monastery, treasures 

of, 204 
Truth, Paris correspondent of, 

139 
Tsar in Paris, 88 
Turguenieff, 143, 159, 175, 198, 

199, 202 
Tyndall, Professor, 41 

Uhrich, General, 146 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 18 
Union Club, Paris, 296 

Verestchagin, 158-170, 199 

— battle pictures — Asia, Central, 

160, 164 

British India, 160 

Russo-Turkish, 161 

— character and aims, 159, 162 

— Court favour, loss of, 161, 

162 

— Exhibition at Berhn, 167-169 

— peasant servant, 163 

— studio in France, 158, 162 

— temper and quarrels, 164, 

169 

— untimely end, 170 
Victorian era, 5, 254-260 
Vienna, 165-167 

" Vignon, Claude" — Mde. Rou- 

vier, 224 
Vigny, Alfred de, 136 



Wagner, 155-157, 184, 321 
Wallace, A. R., on his own time, 

255 
Ward, Genevieve, 124 
Watt, A. P., as literary agent, 270 
Watts - Dunton as friend of 

Genius, 263-267 
WeUington and the Chartists, 12 
Wells, H. G., 270, 330 
Wliarton, Edith, 208 
W. H. H., 209-216 

— influence on women, 212-213 

— trial, a famous, 214 
Whistler, J., 267 
Whitefriars Club, 289 
Whitehouse, F., of The Daily 

Telegraph, 88 
Wickedest Man in America, 71 
Wilberforce, Archdeacon, 312, 313 
Wilson, E. D. J., of The Times, 

64-66, 276 
Working-class Exhibition, Anglo- 
French, 46, 53 
Working Men's College, 35-43 
World, The, New York, 94, 158, 

209, 210 
Wright, Hagberg, 200 
Wyon, Benjamin, medallist, 24,27 

— William, R. A., medallist, 25 

Zangwill, on America as melt- 
ing-pot, 219, 220 

Zichy, Count, Russian Court 
painter, 191 

Zola, influence on Germany, 174 



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